I should start by stating that I am not a professional baker, and I have never attended a professional baking or cooking institution of any kind. This site is about a journey into the world of gluten-free baking, and a refusal to believe that baked goods made without the sultry protein must resemble chewing on raw oats (sorry oats).
As a child, bread to me was the same thing it was to every other kid in America during the 1980’s—an afterthought. A long, spongy, loafy-thing shoved into a multicolor plastic bag with bold promises of wonder, used for making PB & J sandwiches. Utterly mundane in every way and never exciting. Then at 15, I was lucky enough to be part of a school sponsored trip to Europe, and I experienced real bread for the first time. It was imperfectly round, slightly burned, baked in stone ovens that were older than my home country. They filled the early morning cobblestone alleyways with smells unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The windows of French pâtisseries were filled with delicate creations of flour and sugar unlike anything I’d ever imagined. Even though I was a young, angsty teenager stomping around Europe in a Nirvana t-shirt, somehow this planted a seed that years later would blossom into my first cheesecake—seven attempted cheesecakes to be exact. It turns out, baking is hard.
I spent years cultivating and educating myself on artisan breads & pastries, determined to learn as much as I could to stay true to these flavors and textures that changed me forever. I studied the effects of steam on crust to mimic Tuscan environments. I learned about using levain and other starters to create flavor in bread. How to use cold temperatures to manipulate yeast into producing more ethanol than carbon dioxide for those Earthy flavor profiles. People were even occasionally requesting my breads at gatherings and parties—everything was going great, and then I met my wife. My beautiful, loving, adoring, perfect wife—that also has a gluten-allergy. Do you know that phrase “what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” That was me for a moment. I had all this knowledge, and no flour to use it on. I soon shook that off and thought “how hard can it be to convert all my recipes to gluten-free?” It turns out, gluten-free baking is also hard.
This blog is a documented reshaping of everything I’ve ever learned along this journey: Techniques, ingredients, methods that work, and some experimentation for good measure. I’m continuing to learn all the time, but my goal is to help those also on this journey to learn where I have failed, and to give those who need gluten-free options the hope that these baked goods can also be life changing.
