Over the weekend I have been working on getting my gluten free baking notes organized and in a useful form. I wanted to use the computer in particular so that I could esaily add, modify, and pass along a copy to Melody for when she leaves home to prepare her own gluten free meals herself.

Here are the pages that I have so far. You can see the full sized page by clicking on the thumbnaiils.

Starches: One thisng that I have learned over the last few weeks is how useful starches are to making a bread like product. You don't need them so much for cakes and cookies, but boy do they ever make the difference for buns and rolls. On this page I have summaraized the different ones.

Make Your Own Starch from a potato: This page should look familiar. It is one of the entries here on my blog, but it is reformated a bit for the e-notebook.

Flour From Tubers: Potato starch and potato flours are my current favorite for GF baking. You cannot use 100% of them without getting a bit too much of a potato flavor, but the lightness and texture are fantastic. As far as GF flours go, the staling (firming of the texture upon cooling) rate is about as low as you can get.

Flour From Grains: Rice has been our primary staple in the past because I can easily mill it here at home with our Whisper Mill and grocery store rice bought in bulk. But there are others as well. I was surprised at how much more nutritious corn was compared to rice. I think that I will run some corn meal through the Whisper Mill and make it a smoother texture and see how it does for GF cooking - more than just cornbread.

Rise: I found the research into different leavening agents to be quite fascinating. There is a recipe for making your own baking powder too. I think that I am going to make my own as I need it. I have two big jars of cream of tartar from science labs that need to be used up.

Faux Gluten: This has been the newest area of study for me. I have really been amazed by the guar gum, and I want to try the xanthan gum. When I used the counter top mixer to make the honey buns the other day, the guar gum actually made a texture so like gluten in the dough that if I hadn't been so careful, I would have suspected I had contaminated the mix. This stuff is so neat. It does give a after-effect mouth feel. Like you get after eating a fat rich food. Not the thick coating of a shortening based product. Smoother like an oil. I can see why they use it in the diet industry. They can replace some of the oil and reduce the calories, yet the feel to the mouth is as if all the fat is there. I tried it in the pizza crust tonight and was able to make a thin crust pizza that held together just like a wheat one. No crumbling at all and nice and thin.

Texture: What do all those other ingredients do? Here is a bit on that.

Trouble-Shooting: I am sure that I will have pages on this topic over time. LOL. When something doesn't turn out, here is where I will put my 'how to fix it' the next go round.

There are more pages that are yet unfinished as you can see from the tabs. I will add them in as they are fifnished and post updates as I add to the current ones. I like doing this as a notebook that I can continues to add to over time.