Gluten-Free Baking: A Beginners Guide

Are you new to the gluten-free lifestyle and wondering if you have to give up cookies, bread, and muffins for the rest of your life? Don’t be silly! Of course, you can still eat your favourite baked goods, you just have to look at food a little differently.

How do you get started in this new world of baking?

Choose Your Flour

Unless you’re always using our gluten-free mixes, which use buckwheat flour, tapioca flour, brown rice flour, and more, you’re going to need to purchase your own gluten-free flour. We suggest starting with an all-purpose flour blend that’s specially formulated for home bakers. By purchasing a mix, you can ensure that you have the flour that will work well with cookies, cakes, muffins, scones, and more.

Change Your Expectations

If you’ve been baking with gluten your entire life, you might need some time to get used to baking without gluten. Baking gluten-free is not the same process as baking with regular flour. For example, gluten-free bread dough has the thickness of a pancake batter. The first time you see it, you’ll probably think it needs more flour, but that’s not the case; if you add more flour, it will be dense and hard. Instead, throw out those expectations and learn to bake the new way.

Combine Flours

If you decide not to buy a pre-combined flour blend, you’ll probably have to combine flours to make the baked goods you want. In fact, most of the times you’ll have to combine at least two to three flours together to make a mixture that works. For example, to bake delicious cookies, you might need to combine coconut flour with tapioca flour so that your mixture is moist and binds well.

Bake by Weight

To be a confident gluten-free baker, you need to say goodbye to the measuring cups you have and say hello to the scale. Learn to adapt your favourite recipes to ounces, grams, and litres. It might seem complicated at first, but you’ll be glad you made the change. The more exact you become, the better tasting your baked goods will be.

Have Fun 

Baking gluten-free is a learning experience. You’re going to make mistakes. There will be brownies, cookies, and bread that come out hard as a brick and dry and tasteless. That’s okay. Don’t expect yourself to be great right away. Go back to your beginner’s mindset and have fun with your cooking. Experiment and see what works best. Eventually, you’ll make delicious creations every time, but it’s okay to have some issues in the beginning.

Baking gluten-free won’t be the same as baking with gluten, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be a nightmare. The truth is that many gluten-free baked goods actually taste better than their gluten counterparts. Gluten-free cakes can be fluffier and better tasting than their gluten counterparts.

So, roll up your sleeves and prepare to learn a brand new way to bake! It will well be worth the effort.