When any of you first begin the gluten free diet, I am sure can recall the frustration of your first baking experience. If you’re new to the diet, I am here to help you make easy gluten free recipes. If you are one of the few lucky ones you already have someone to guide you, you still may find some tips and recipes below useful. Meanwhile, peruse over 225 Easy Gluten Free Recipes on this site. This category contains both cooked and baked recipes. They are categorized as such because they are either easy or fast to make and/or include few ingredients. Make the process even easier by following the tips below.
Choosing an All-Purpose Flour and Other Mixes
We all understand how you feel when baking gluten free. There are so many more ingredients in a gluten free recipe. One thing that may help you is to choose a gluten free all-purpose for most of your recipes. Then tailor it to your needs. Once you discover which flour mix or homemade blend creates the best cupcakes and cakes, make a big batch of it and store it for later use. Then it will be as easy as baking with gluten all-purpose flour.
Once you found your favorite boxed mixes you’re set, but if you are a baker from scratch, then you’ll need to create your own. If you make brownies or tortillas often, create a big batch of that mix and then just add your wet ingredients. Then it’s just like baking from box mixes which definitely makes for easy gluten free recipes. Discover 12 different homemade mixes in the Gluten Flour Mixes category.
Using the Correct Tools
Carol Fenster wrote an excellent article on the tools you will need for gluten free baking. Check it out at Utensils for a Gluten Free Kitchen. In addition to the utensils she discusses keep in mind some of my favorites: pastry roller (great for small pieces of dough placed in pans); dough scraper/spatula (gluten free dough is more sticky, therefore sometimes needs to be scraped up); and a pizza peel (great for transferring fragile pizza dough a pizza stone).
If you are the only one in your household that is gluten free, consider purchasing 4 – 5-inch cake, pie, and tart pans. They can be used from everything they should be to making english muffins and hamburger buns. You can always scale down a recipe for 1 or 2 servings. These also make it convenient to freeze individualized portions.
Preparing Ahead
As it is applied to gluten cooking and baking, Mise en Place (means “set in place”) always creates easy gluten free recipes, as it saves you time, and prevents errors. Read about it at the link above. Chopping, peeling, slicing, shredding, and washing food in advance saves you time. And measuring in advance saves you errors in baking. I cannot tell you how many times I have added a dry ingredient into a bowl of several other dry ingredients to realize that it was the wrong amount. You can easily grab the wrong dry measuring cup. Doing this in advance provides an additional opportunity to double check the ingredients. Now that I apply mise en place, I catch errors prior to adding them into a dish.
I didn’t cover everything in this article; therefore, feel free to either ask questions or provide others with your ideas below in the comment section. You email address will only be seen by me, and kept confidential.
Carla