The Ultimate Gluten-Free Cookie Book (2 page)

It is worth noting that nonceliac gluten intolerance is not necessarily any less severe than that of celiac disease. And in many people it is more severe. In either case, avoiding gluten helps to resolve an incredibly large number of health problems. There are well over two hundred different conditions known to be associated with gluten intolerance, and the list grows weekly as more research is done. Many common complaints such as fatigue, headaches, arthritis, anemia, heartburn, diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating, abdominal pain, eczema, osteoporosis, and even weight gain can be caused by a gluten intolerance. A more complete list can be found in my new book,
Healthier Without Wheat
:
A New Understanding of Wheat Allergies, Celiac Disease, and Non-Celiac Gluten Intolerance
.

Of course, going gluten-free is easier said than done. This is where the ideal of living healthier without gluten meets the practicality of trying to do just that. It’s a steep learning curve, and there are bound to be frustrations. There are also the emotional attachments to food that we develop over a lifetime. And that is never truer than it is for baking cookies, which is almost a national pastime.

For these reasons, we are incredibly fortunate to have Roben’s book. Roben has dramatically shortened the learning curve for the rest of us, and given us hope that we can maintain some old traditions as long as we’re willing
to learn to do them a little differently. And she has done this for just about any cookie that one can imagine, or at least that I can imagine.

What’s more, Roben has also incorporated the recent research by the Cereal Quality Lab at Texas A&M to bring us a healthier cookie. That may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, but every effort helps. Gluten-free foods are nutritionally often a shell of their wheat-based counterparts. Using brown rice flour and sorghum flour is a major improvement, and it doesn’t detract from the taste of the cookie. These are still the real thing, not some health food substitute for a cookie.

I hope that you enjoy learning to bake these cookies, and I am thrilled that you’ll be able to be gluten-free in the process. On behalf of all of us, thank you, Roben.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen
—no, we are not in chemistry class. We are discussing the elemental ingredients in your cookies. A certain fuzzy blue monster once sang, “C is for Cookie and that’s good enough for me,” but when it comes to baking easy gluten-free and allergy-free cookies, one has to take a closer look at the science behind the combination of ingredients that we are using.

Your typical wheat-based cookie is made from what bakers call “soft flour.” A soft flour means that it has a lower protein (gluten) content than a hard wheat flour that is used to make wheat breads. The gluten protein in the flour helps hold the dough and the final cookie or bread together. That’s why your cookie is soft and easy to chew but strong enough to keep from crumbling. Gluten-free baking can often be frustrating, as you no longer have the majority of that protein structure. Gluten-free flours do not have the same type of proteins that hold your other contents together, so ingredients like xanthan gum or guar gum are added to gluten-free dough to help out instead. Fortunately, due to the low gluten content in cookie recipes,
cookies are easier to mimic for gluten-free recipes than more complicated products.

Gluten-free flours are made from a wide variety of grains, pseudo-grains, seeds, nuts, tubers, and pretty much anything else you can think of that can be ground into a semi-powder form to be called a “flour.” Some gluten-free flours are processed into what is sold as a starch, just a portion of the parent flour. These starches (sometimes referred to as flours by producers) from potato, tapioca, and corn are often criticized for being “unhealthy,” so this poses the questions: What is starch? And why does it make my gluten-free baked goods tasty?

Starch is the primary constituent of all cookies, gluten-free or not. It is a naturally occurring carbohydrate found in fruits, vegetables, grains, and tubers that are made up of thousands upon thousands of glucose molecules linked together. The easiest way to visualize starch in its natural form is to grab a sheet of paper and draw a circle on it; this is your starch granule that is made up of the thousands of little glucose molecules. Any flour, when you look at it under a microscope, contains lots of these starch granules that make up the “bulk” of what you can see and feel of the flour.

Starch can take many different sizes, shapes, and forms depending on the source you are using, but they don’t act the same. For instance, the starch in tapioca is not the same as the starch in rice. Some starch granules can be shaped like pentagons, some in nice round circles or ovals, and the sizes vary as well. In baking, when liquid is added to the batter or dough and then heated, the starch molecules soak up the water molecules, causing the chemical bonds within the starch to change. When the water-soaked starch reaches a certain temperature it melts (gelatinizes), which means that you can no longer see the original shape of the starch granule and it helps hold the crumb of the cookie or bread you are baking together, like glue. Starch, whether used in pure form or as a component of all flours, is a critical part of gluten-free baking as it makes up for the majority of the structure of your cookie or bread, since the traditional wheat proteins are missing.

The cookie recipes that Roben created for this book mainly use brown rice flour or sorghum flour. These are two easy to find, high fiber, nutritious,
and economical flours. Her recipes will not fill your pantry with expensive flours often utilized in various gluten-free blends. We hope that you enjoy the recipes from this book as much as we do—and remember, you don’t need seven different kinds of flour to make a good cookie!

 

As I write these words
, I think about you standing there, trying to figure out which gluten-free cookbook to buy and wondering if these cookies will taste good. You may even be wondering if purchasing ingredients will stress your budget, too. I wish you could be in my kitchen, having the scent of delicious, fresh-baked cookies hit you as you enter my home, and sampling three or four kinds while we chat. But you’ll have to settle for my words, my reputation, and my photos. The picture of Girl Scout Thin Mints-Style Cookies on page 6 of the insert, one of my favorite great fakes, is representative that almost anything is deliciously possible in a gluten-free cookie.

Whether seeking a squishy scooter pie, a delicate butter cookie, or a crisp graham cracker, you will find it here. I thought about making a separate chapter for dairy-free cookies, but most of the cookies in this book are dairy-free. Dairy just doesn’t always enhance a gluten-free cookie recipe. I have, however, made a separate chapter for egg-free cookies. In that chapter I opt to avoid egg substitutes and, as in the rest of this book, use ordinary ingredients to tempt your taste buds.

These amazing cookies are not only easy to make, they’re as close as you can get to the real deal. I’ve been working in the gluten-free industry since the early 1990s, but I myself do not live with major dietary restrictions (although I limit dairy). I am a food science junkie and a person that simply
loves food. I will test, test, and retest a gluten-free recipe until the nuances are achieved, often by eating the original alongside my version. I don’t have to remember or wonder what something tastes like (although some foods are vivid in everyone’s memory!). I simply taste the original cookie, dissect it, and do my best to duplicate the experience for you.

In the last thirty years, gluten-free baking has come a long way. (See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the evolution of gluten-free baking and how we ended up with complicated food.) Fortunately, by embracing food science and daring to think simpler, we now can have delicious, healthier treats, made with just
one
bag of flour, a little xanthan gum, and everyday ingredients already in your kitchen.

Most of the cookies in this book are made with either brown rice flour or sorghum. Really—that’s it! No complicated flour blends required. All I can say, is how cool is that? Brown rice flour is a healthy, affordable, whole-grain flour that provides a wonderful, neutral base on which to build cookie flavor! Sorghum flour, nearly whole-grain, has a lower glycemic index, good nutrition, and an understated fuller grain flavor that doesn’t spar with other flavors. And both of these flours can produce incredible textures!

Setting aside food science, it just feels great knowing that you will have tasty cookies! But hopefully, this book gives you something more . . . fabulous cookies to take to a party, a marathon holiday baking session with loved ones, s’mores at a backyard barbecue, renewed fame for cookie-baking talents, or the most sought-after cookies on the tray. It is my goal that this book brings you the simple joy of cookies. And when you taste your first scrumptious cookie from this book, know that I’m smiling with you. Cookie, cookies, cookies. Life can be sweet.

1

I first began experimenting with
gluten-free foods nearly two decades ago, when a friend of mine who was diagnosed with gluten intolerance innocently asked me if I could help make her something tasty to eat. At that time many gluten-free recipes were made with just rice flour. They were often gritty, dried out quickly, and didn’t taste very good. Availability was sparse and the industry was just taking notice of the need for gluten-free foods.

Over the last fifteen years or so, thanks to advances in food science, gluten-free baking has evolved to produce really delicious desserts. These results were made possible by using blends of two, three, four . . . or even seven different alternative flours. Sometimes gelatin, ascorbic acid, and other ingredients were added to provide better results. And, to their credit, many recipes and gluten-free cookbooks use blends that create admirable products.

But using many different flours in a blend can quickly get complicated for you, the baker. After all, who wants to buy three different kinds of expensive flour to make one recipe, then several other flours to make another? Did the pendulum have to swing so far in such a difficult direction? Why choose complicated? So, I began to work toward improving single-flour gluten-free baking. And as it turns out, it can be done very successfully!

Historically we’ve found that those early, simple gluten-free baking recipes provided less than ideal results. Complicated recipes that called for multiple grains and starches were more reliable. But why? Are complex blends really necessary?

First we must understand why blends work. It has everything to do with flour textures and baking properties. To oversimplify, if you think of a cup of traditional white (wheat) flour, you could say it is a perfect 5 on a scale of 1 to 10! Utilizing traditional white flour makes cakes and cookies that turn out just as we expect.

Traditional white flour is not too light, not too heavy. Accordingly, if you’re baking cookies, this perfect 5 would beat out a 10—a light flour that rises greatly and which would be at the highest end of our scale—anytime. Likewise, a 2 or a 3 “heavy” flour (at the bottom of our scale) wouldn’t be good, either. And, as early history has proven, a heavy flour, such as rice, substituted in a recipe cup for cup, would typically result in baked goods with a texture like a hockey puck or cardboard. It is funny only in hindsight!

Although using blends is generally not my philosophy, let’s see how one is made. Remember that 5 is the known perfect on our scale. If you were to take one or more light alternative flours (such as tapioca starch, potato starch, or cornstarch) and combine them with several heavier flours (such as cornmeal, brown rice flour, or millet), you would end up with an averaged value pretty close to perfect. To take a very broad view, light flours = 10, heavy flours = 1. Add 10 plus 1 and then divide by 2, and you have just about achieved the perfect 5.

But it doesn’t stop there. While we’re building a better mousetrap, let’s worry about empty flours (starches with limited dietary benefit—but easy on a tender gut), fiber levels (whole grains, flax, and others), protein levels (think soy and bean flours), and more attributes of other pseudograins! If you combine all these levels of flours, some light, some medium, some heavy, you can still stay near that perfect 5 and enhance nutrition at the same time!
Wow, all of that in a flour blend! If flour represented our entire dietary intake (and if it were the only ingredient in a recipe), that would be ideal. We do, however, eat other nutritious foods. Have we ever expected so much from traditional breads, cakes, and cookies?

Should you choose to mix blends to use for baking, you will soon find your cupboards full of alternative flours. It may be difficult to evaluate which of them your body tolerates. It may be also difficult to know the true flavor of some of these flours, because they are part of a blend. Sometimes we can look at the source of the flour and get a feel for how it will taste. Bean flour does, actually, taste like beans. Coconut flour tastes like coconut with every bit of sweet juice removed (like tropical dirt, in my opinion). And some others taste worse (soy tastes like grass, montina like dried corn husks—actually good in a small quantity; quinoa even grassier; teff is earthy and grassy; etc.). I’m just sharing my honest opinions before you spend a lot of money on a flour you may not enjoy. Although one can make a cookie out of almost anything, that doesn’t mean you want to eat it.