Step up your gluten-free baking game

A few simple tips for your gluten-free baking success

Don’t you hate it when you buy all the ingredients to make something delicious, but the recipe doesn’t turn out like you’d hoped. Wasting ingredients is so frustrating, but it’s not you. It’s the recipe, the assumed steps and techniques, and the approach to gluten-free baking that causes the problems.

There are few recipes that are hard to make. Even when you consider baking with gluten-free, or vegan ingredients. With the right technique, a few tools, and a trusty recipe you can find great success in making delicious gluten-free things.

Oh! You also need a tiny bit of practice … though a good technique and tools will take you far, really getting to know a recipe before, during, and after baking it will give you expertise you never knew you needed.

I am here to give you the deets on how to step you your gluten-free baking game. Ready for it? Let’s go!

Let’s start with the tools. Baking with gluten-free ingredients requires a gram scale. That’s it, my hottest tip. Since kitchen scales are easy to find and fairly inexpensive, don’t waive this off. After your first bake by weight comes out amazingly, you’ll be kicking yourself why you didn’t take this approach sooner.

Why is this so important? Baking with gluten-free ingredients relies on specific reactions based on ratios of ingredients. We are replacing a trusted reaction that happens with wheat flour with a combination ingredients that carry very unique properties, coaxing them into a a favorable reaction. With a scale you get better accuracy, verses measuring by volume. Even tiny variations to the ratios cause dramatic changes. I can spot a difference in my most trusted bread recipe with just 1 teaspoon difference in liquid.

I definitely have some favorite scales for my home kitchen. I love this one for its 1 gram accuracy and long battery life.

The more the merrier!

You’ll learn quickly that gluten-free recipes thrive with more liquid and more fat, more mixing, and more resting. You’ll develop new techniques with experience along with your own preferences. Generally, you can throw out all of your tried and true techniques. Egg whites still need to be beaten, sugar and butter still requires the creaming method. But kneading is mostly out the window, the dough hook on your trusty mixer is also out. Extra mixing, extra rest-time? Both are in! Extra baking time? Yesss! More liquid and more fat? Yep, also in! And that rarely used paddle attachment on your mixer will be your bestie very soon.

As for trusty recipes — I’ll be sharing some of our favorites, how to find a good traditional recipe candidates to be converted to a gluten-free version, and even how to translate a favorite old recipe.

Join in on all the fun — hit the subscribe button and let’s get to baking!