Gluten Free baking and cooking

As I wrote before about my family and I need to go gluten free. We are using some store bought GF foods while we learn how to cook and bake gluten free.

Our first try at gluten free was a simple mac & cheese with GF pasta. Though the picture isn’t the best, it tasted really good. We were pleasantly surprised at how good the GF pasta tasted. I’m so thankful that the store that Paul works at sells it in bulk. 🙂

Then we took a break on GF eating because of surgeries, schedules and what not. So this past week we finally cleaned out our kitchen and stocked up on things for GF cooking. I knew the first thing I wanted to find was a GF all purpose flour. I found a recipe on this site, and it looked simple enough and people liked it. So I went ahead and made some.

With the kitchen cleaned up and my GF all purpose flour made I decided to try out some simple GF chocolate chip cookies. I took the Nestle recipe and exchanged normal all purpose flour with my GF mixture. I figured, why not, lets see if it works. Our baking is a little tricky, because we don’t bake with eggs, we bake with a homemade egg substitute. Sarah is allergic to raw eggs, and she likes to bake, so we’ve been baking with substitutes for a few years now. But this is a new recipe we started using just a few months ago. We’ve been having a hard time with our cookies and this substitute, even with regular flour. So instead of regular cookies, I decided to bake bar cookies, it’s easier and quicker.

It mixed together just fine, and even the dough tasted yummy. It looks like normal cookie dough, doesn’t it?

I’ve been fooled before. When using the egg substitute, we’ve made desserts and they looked great until we tried baking them. So I wasn’t too impressed until I saw how it did after baking. One of the things I have learned is that with GF baking the mixture isn’t as thick, and you need to let things sit for a while before cutting into them. So when the cookies looked like they had baked long enough, even though the middle seemed a bit wiggly, I went ahead and took them out of the oven. I let them sit for a while, but not quite long enough. I just really wanted to see how they tasted, and I wanted Paul to try them before he had to leave. They looked liked normal cookies, don’t they?

Because I didn’t wait quite as long as I should have, they were pretty gooey when we tried them, but they tasted really good! I was so happy and pleasantly surprised with how good they tasted. There was a bit of a difference in texture, but I think it’s how it would taste if I had substituted wheat flour. Paul and Paulie couldn’t tell a difference, and Paulie can always tell when things are different. But then I found when I tried some after dinner, they were set perfectly, not so gooey. So my first thought was right, I just need to let GF baking sit longer before I cut into them.

I don’t know how they would be as drop cookies instead of bars, but like I said, we haven’t been able to get drop cookies to work with the egg substitute anyway, so I’m not going to worry about that right now. I’m just so happy to know we have a least one snack that we like, that we can throw together quick and easy that is GF.

Now our next thing to try is GF bread. That should be fun. 😀

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