Adapting Recipes to be Gluten Free

For some people, cooking and baking is second nature.  For others, it is a struggle.  Amanda and I have very different cooking styles.  I like to follow a recipe to the T, yes that's a capital T because I rarely deviate from the recipes.  Amanda, likes to follow a recipe, but takes her liberties substituting ingredients she doesn't like, putting less or more of an ingredient.  We are all over the map.  Now throw in the fact that some of the recipe books we use are not dedicated gluten free recipes, and need to be converted, and you got a party in our kitchen!

I'll say this, adapting baking recipes to be gluten free is much harder.  In fact, I'm not a baker, so I am really not going to touch on this because I'm most likely going to give you bad information or bad tips.  However, I do love to cook, and I do use general cook books and adapt recipes when needed.

One of my favourite cookbooks is America's Test Kitchen, which I have written about before.  There are plenty of recipes in that book that are not naturally gluten free, but are pretty easy to make gluten free.  Why is this important?  Because you don't necessarily need to go out and buy a gluten free cook book, because you may already have a nice collection of cook books.  It's just a matter of learning to adapt.

So what type of situations will you come across that need adapting?

Pasta Recipes
Don't think all your favourite pasta dishes are no longer.  There are plenty of great gluten free pasta's out there that make great substitutes.  One of our favourites is Tinkyada gluten free pasta.  They have all sorts of types of pasta shapes available.  We also like Rizopia's gluten free pasta.  The one thing to keep in mind is that rice and corn pasta's really soak up sauce, even after cooked.  So if you are making a really loose sauce, you may want to mix it as you serve, instead of mixing everything.

Breaded Dishes
Kinnikinnick's bread crumbs work perfectly on any breaded dish.  We often make chicken fingers for dinner, or breaded mushrooms as an appetizer.  Their bread crumbs get nice and toasty and hold up well as left overs too.  No real tip needed for cooking with the gluten free bread crumbs, because they pretty much work like bread crumbs.

Stir Fry's
A lot of Asian sauces use soy sauce as a base.  Soy sauce typically contain a wheat flour in them.  Couldn't tell you why, but they do.  Luckily, there are options out there for gluten free soy sauce.  VH's soy sauce is made without wheat.  Kikkoman also has a gluten free soy sauce that can sometimes be found at Safeway.

Salads
People love to put croutons in salad because it adds a nice crunch to your meals.  You don't have to live without croutons.  You can easily turn Glutino's corn bread cubes or Kinnikinnick's bread cubes into seasoned gluten free croutons.

When in doubt, try Googling a recipe and see what comes up.  If you are stumped and can't figure out how to make something gluten free, you probably aren't the first one.  Someone probably has a solution that they blogged about already.

Of course, always remember to read labels of ingredients you are using.  Often times a manufacturer will change up a recipe and may end up using a gluten ingredient like wheat flour as a substitute for corn starch.

Gluten Free Edmonton - A Celiac guide and resource for gluten free information in Edmonton, Alberta