Gluten-Free Baking

Since I had to go gluten-free a year and a half ago, I've been learning to bake all over again. I've actually enjoyed myself a lot, learning to use new materials, new kinds of flour, new kinds of techniques and blends. I've viewed this as a fun project, not as a hardship.

When my friends were visiting from out of town, we had some fun experimenting with baking. We made a key lime pie from fresh key limes. We made a few other projects, for fun. I've found a gluten-free pancake and waffle mix that I really like, that makes great waffles. I found my mother's 1970s Oster waffle-maker when I was emptying out my parents' house. It was buried in the back of a cupboard in the kitchen. I doubt anyone had seen or used it in years. I've been enjoying making waffles periodically ever since.

A few days ago, then, we made scones. I used the basic scone recipe from that classic of cooking, The Joy of Cooking, which I have three different editions of, from three different decades. It's fun to have an old edition of Joy, as it contains recipes dropped later on.

We made scones with white chocolate chips and blueberries, following the basic recipe. The result was fabulous. Delicious, tasty, and perfect.

One of the tricks of doing gluten-free baking is that, obviously, you have to find another binding agent for the flours, since wheat gluten is not possible. I use xantham gum, and I also use an egg yolk.

From the egg whites left over from the key lime pie, we also experimented with making maple meringue cookies. That was less successful, and we undercooked them. But it was an experiment, and although they were soft and didn't shape up right, they were delicious.

But I'm real proud of the scones. They were fantastic.

Dinner With Friends

Recently I hosted a big dinner party at home, with friends visiting from out of town. I served on the redwood table on the back porch. I had planned the meal for a few days beforehand, and done shopping and preparations. Afterwards, I was really tired, but it was a good dinner. The extra glass of wine, sitting on the porch, as the dusk surrounded the house after folks had left, was soothing.

Since I had to change my diet and go gluten-free a year and a half ago, I have been learning to bake all over again. A lot of the cuisines I have been cooking and eating for years were already virtually gluten-free—a lot of Asian cuisines use rice rather than wheat products as a matter of course—and others have been not hard to modify—I love Italian, and am a major user of Marcella Hazan's recipes, especially her classic book Essentials of Italian Cooking.



For this dinner, I had envisioned and invented a sort of Italian pan-roasted chicken variation. I cut chicken breasts the long way and pan-roasted the strips on the stove in my largest pan, lightly covering them with lemon juice, minced garlic, and a pinch of rosemary. I turned the strips a couple of times, and let them roast on the stove for about 25 minutes on low-medium heat. Then, for the last two minutes of cooking, I glazed the chicken with a reduced-orange glaze I’d made the night before—the juices of two oranges, simmered slowly on low heat for about two hours, with a pinch of tarragon—sprinkled them with more minced garlic flakes, and broiled them for two minutes to brown the glaze. I also dribbled small chunks of Boursin cheese on top of the chicken, which added another spot of flavor; as the cheese melted and browned under the broiler, and the orange glaze browned, the dish was all done.

The chicken was then served on a platter, on a bed of rinsed spinach. The heat from the chicken wilted the spinach just a little bit. The orange glaze wasn’t at all sweet, but tart and citrus, and the pinch of tarragon added a complementary savory flavor. The only flaw in this recipe was that the chicken was the tiniest bit dry; I think next time I make this, more of the juice from the pan-roasting phase needs to follow the chicken into the broiler, to keep it moist. But the flavor was terrific.

I served the chicken with saffron rice, with raisins in it. Everybody seemed to think the meal was delicious, and the raisin-saffron rice was a good complement. I only used just a tiny amount of saffron, so it didn’t color the rice much, but did a hint of flavor to it.

I served the meal with a favorite pinot grigio from Tuscany.



I had seen this meal in my mind’s eye a few days before, but I did look up pan-roasted chicken in Marcella Hazan’s cookbook, just to make sure about timings and flavors.

For dessert, my former neighbor J. made a black raspberry silk pie in a gluten-free pie shell, from berries she’d picked from her garden around his house. We had that with Cool Whip on top. I had made a key lime pie, too, only this time I had gotten a bag full of key limes from Mexico; we juiced about 30 of the little limes at great personal peril to make the pie. It takes about a cup of juice for a big pie—those gluten-free pie shells are about double the size of the store-bought regular pie shells, so they hold a double recipe. We made a but more juice then needed, so the pie came out extra-tart, which was wonderful. I’ll probably make key lime pies most of ten from the store-bought juice that’s really good (Nellie & Joe’s Key Lime Juice), but this was a good experiment, and a good result.