Why a gluten free diet for baby?  It’s a wise move to steer clear of all allergens for the first year of life.  Allergies are essentially the body’s immune system rejecting something that is being introduced into the system and the human immune system doesn’t quite finish developing until somewhere between the age of one and two.  These allergens include the big ones like dairy, wheat, and soy.  Given the opportunity to fully develop, baby’s chances of being allergy free increase significantly especially if there is a history of allergies in the family.

One of the key indicators of a sensitivity to a certain food is eczema.  Nico had flare ups of eczema in his early months while breastfeeding–the elimination of dairy from my diet cleared it right up and he now has no problem with it.

Looks like wheat has begun to give him some trouble however.  Like most tots, he is incredibly picky and has recently refused to eat anything aside from cereal, crackers, pretzels, yogurt with granola, and raisins.  That’s pretty much it.

As a result of this overload of wheat products and refined carbohydrates, the eczema has returned in full force.  We’re going back to gluten free to help diversify his diet and to ensure that there are no problems down the road.

And honestly, there’s nothing that makes you feel more like a badass than making your own granola bars.

Gluten Free Lemon Bread with Chia Seeds

Feeling a little disheartened after my last gluten free experiment, I took a little time to mellow out a bit and investigate some alternative solutions for gluten free baking.  Yes, I’m researching alternatives to gluten free alternatives.

Even I don’t have a smart ass comment for that one.

My thought about using quinoa flour was right on the money in theory.  Quinoa is a complete protein source and would easily do well in a mixture of flours according to Cooking Free by Carol Fenster, PhD.  I was very eager to try it out–I bought a lovely bag of quinoa from the bulk section of our local co-op and came home and threw it in the food processor to grind it into flour.  After about six minutes of rolling around in there, I gave up on that idea and put it in the blender a couple of cups at a time.  Success.  In the blender the grains ground down to a fine power that would be a suitable substitute for flour.

Except that it smells very earthy and grainy and would NOT be very good in lemon bread.  Crackers or sandwich bread, yes–lemon bread, no.  Time to throw together a Plan B.  After scoping out the kitchen for a minute I spied some gluten free oats so I went through the blender process again to create oat flour.  There we go.

Here is the latest mixture:

• 2 parts gluten free oat flour
• 2 parts brown rice flour
• 1 part white rice flour
• 1 part arrowroot starch

My hopes for using arrowroot starch and chia seed goo were horribly dashed when the bread turned out very, very, very crumbly.

But it tastes good.

Really good.

So good that I couldn’t keep my paws off it for the picture.  And even though I planned on just eating one piece and putting the other back, I totally ate them both with great aplomb.  Ok, the baby helped.  He loves it too, and I guess in all fairness I made it for him so he should get some.

I based this version of lemon bread off of a recipe that I found at this wonderful site and my  favorite recipe for lemon bread from Moosewood’s Book of Desserts. Don’t forgo the lemon glaze.  You will never be the same.

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Gluten Free Lemon Bread with Chia Seeds

• 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 Tbsp. of freshly grated lemon peel (about 1 large lemon or 2 medium)
• 1 1/2 cups gluten free flour substitute (or regular old white flour)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 3 Tbsp. chia seeds (poppy seeds are good too)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1)  Combine the milk and the chia seeds in a small bowl and let sit to form a goop.

2)  In a large bowl, cream together the butter and the brown sugar until light and blended–either by hand or with an electric mixer.  Beat in the eggs one at a time.  Add the lemon peel.  In a separate bowl, sift together the flour mixture, baking powder, and salt.  Alternately add the the flour mixture and the milk goop to the creamed mixture, beating just enough to combine after each addition.

3)  Pour the batter into a prepared loaf pan (4 1/2″x8 1/2″) and bake for about 45-55 minutes, until golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.  Cool in the pan on a rack for 10-15 minutes.

While the bread is cooling, prepare the lemon glaze:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (about two lemons)

Combine sugar and lemon juice in a small saucepan and heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar dissolves.  At this point you can decide if you want to serve the bread from the pan or if you want to take it out.  Poke holes in the top of the lemon bread with a toothpick and drizzle the glaze all over the loaf.

Now here is where the crumbly texture of the bread got tricky.  I like to serve the lemon bread from a plate so that means I had to take it out of the pan.  It kind of broke into pieces when I popped it out so I had to just glaze the chunks, which was still very, very, very tasty.  Next time I will try letting it cool completely and then adding the glaze.  And I will try to find a binding agent that will perform a bit better…

Nico is now eleven months old, so I figure by the time I get it down he’ll be just about ready to eat all of the forbidden foods.  Good thing I have gluten intolerant friends!  Well, I guess not good for them.  Whatever.  Eat your bread.

It looks innocent enough–just don’t eat it. Unless you like the taste of paste. And the texture of cooked paste. Yuck. This definitely does NOT pass the “can’t taste like something you would feed a horse” rule.

Luckily I am a very determined (some might call it “stubborn”) woman and I refuse to give in to the quandary of the world of gluten free. So as it turns out, our friend gluten does some pretty magical stuff. It is a protein that binds with other ingredients and creates stretchy structures that create the chewy texture of foods like bread. After failing miserably with my recipe trials this week, I thought it might be time to start digging into the science of baking and how possible substitutions might be used in similar applications.

I’m assuming all of this has been done before but there’s just too much information available for me to really wrap my mind around the process. De-mystifying gluten free cooking will have to be a trial and error process for awhile until I discover which substitutions work easily and without notice. I figure it will behoove me to remain a little in the dark about the wealth of recipes available and attempt to come up with my own solution. I’m certainly no stranger to the world of special diets–I have worked in the kitchen of one of the largest co-ops in the west for the last three years and we cater to all kinds of goofy eating habits. But gluten free cooking–make that GOOD gluten free cooking–still remains a mystery to me.

Here is what I have discovered so far:

• rice flour is really grainy–a little too much so for my taste
• rice flour also makes HORRIBLE pizza dough
• there are a lot of binding agents out there but so far all of the ones I have tried leave a bitter aftertaste.

Since gluten is a protein, I am wondering if a flour substitute that contains protein would work in a similar manner. Rice flour is made from the hulls of the rice and is thereby stripped of its nutritional quality, as is the case with many of the alternative flours. Quinoa may be a good choice to investigate since it is a complete protein on its own and I can easily throw it in the food processor to make it into flour, which makes it pretty easy to come by.

As far as binding agents are concerned, arrowroot will be my next attempt along with a trial using soaked chia seeds. Chia (yep, like chia pets) is one of the most nutritious things that you can eat–even better for you than flax seeds and you don’t have to crack the hulls to reap the benefits. When you soak chia seeds they form kind of a gelatinous goop which is commonly used as an egg substitute in vegan dishes. I am curious to see if it will help bind my flours as well as kick in an extra boost of nutrition.

Plus Chia Pets are cool. We’re still looking for a Jerry Gar-Chia if you should happen to run across one at a thrift shop or yard sale sometime.

I’ve also read that tapioca starch imparts a “chewiness” to breads so I’m pretty eager to try that out as well.

Being that the gluten free version of my favorite pizza dough was a complete disaster, here is a polenta crust recipe that will really knock your socks off. Sans gluten, of course.

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Grilled Polenta Pizza Crust

2 1/2 cups water

3/4 polenta (yellow cornmeal)

1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

1 Tablespoon butter

In a 2 quart saucepan, whisk the cornmeal, salt, and water together until there are no lumps. Bring mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring frequently. Reduce heat to a simmer; cook, stirring constantly, until the polenta leaves a clean path when you scrape the bottom of the pan (typically 20 -30 mins according to most cookbooks though I find it happens much more quickly). Add butter, stir it in as it melts.

Dump the mixture into an oiled 8×8 baking pan and press down with a spatula or back of a spoon to cool. This creates the shape of your crust and it should be about 3/4 to 1 inch thick. Cool until the polenta is about room temperature and very firm to the touch. Fire up the grill to a medium / medium-high heat. Indirect grilling is best if you are using a charcoal grill.

Remove the polenta from the pan, being careful to keep it in one piece, and oil both sides. Grill one side of the polenta until crisp and grill-marked (only takes a few minutes). Pull the polenta off the grill and put your sauce, toppings, and cheese on the side that has already been grilled. Put the whole kit and kaboodle back on the grill and continue cooking until the cheese melts and the outside of the crust is crispy.

If you don’t want to grill it, you can cook the slab of polenta in a bit of oil in a frying pan until it becomes crisp and golden brown.  The outside will be crisp and the middle will be creamy and polenta-ey.  Mmm.

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Sounds good, doesn’t it? Now that’s a gluten free recipe that nobody will even think twice about.

Obstacle One of the Gluten Free Challenge: create gluten free foods that the boy is willing to eat.

Obstacle Two of the Gluten Free Challenge: create gluten free foods that we are willing to eat.

So there is a lot of information out there on gluten free cooking these days. It has been a little overwhelming to say the least…a little bit of “too many cooks in the kitchen” so to speak. After going cross-eyed from researching the different options for gluten free flour substitutes, I finally decided to try six different ones in order to isolate which ingredients are truly necessary to achieve a mix that includes the following criteria:

• easy to find ingredients
• works as a 1:1 substitute (if recipe calls for 1 cup flour then 1 cup of mix will be used)
• must not taste like something you would feed a horse
• a decent texture (not necessarily identical to the gluten infested version).

The mixes that I will be using vary from a simple substitution of brown rice flour to a crazy menagerie of 10+ ingredients. Is xanthum gum really necessary? What the hell is tapioca starch? I will be finding the answers to these questions and many, many more. I will probably be creating a lot of questions in the process as well.

For my first run, I opted to try out our recipe for the world’s best banana bread. I used a gluten free mix made up of:

• 3 parts brown rice flour
• 3 parts corn starch
• 2 parts sorghum flour or soy flour
• 1 part corn flour or masa harina

The batter.

The judge.

Go for it kiddo.  Notice that the loaf turned out “normal” looking–a perfect camping snack.  Sorry the pic is blurry but it’s tough to take a picture while the tot lunging for banana bread is sitting on your lap.

A little crumbly, but not so much that it would deter me from using this mix.  I might try adding an extra egg to help it bind better.

The first bite.

I’m so nervous!

Success.

Overall, I thought the loaf of banana bread turned out pretty decent.  It was a little on the “corny” side…not overwhelming but definitely a hint of corn.  The dough still gave a nice rise and the overall flavor was pretty good.  But then again it’s pretty hard to destroy the world’s best banana bread.

And here’s the recipe for that:

World’s Best Banana Bread

• 3 or 4 ripe bananas, mashed
• 1/3 cup melted butter (I substitute applesauce with no problem)
• 1/2 cup sugar (this amount has already been reduced by half)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cup flour (or gluten free substitute)

Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C).  With a wooden spoon, mix butter (or applesauce) into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl.  Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla.  Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in.  Add the flour (or substitute) last, mix.  Pour mixture into a greased 4×8 inch loaf pan.  Bake for 1 hour.  Cool on a rack, remove from pan, slice, serve.

And yes, you can cut the amount of sugar in any recipe by half with no effect on the taste.  Not true with brown sugar, but definitely with granulated.  Good to know.

The flowers from AnnieDesign are all here!  Cute little buggers, aren’t they?  Finishing this project is at the top of the list for this week.

Since there is no Farmers Market this week (the fair is coming, silly) I am taking this opportunity to catch up on a few ideas and further develop some products in the works already.  Here’s is what you can expect over the next couple of weeks:

• Some information on babywearing as well as a tutorial for how to use an onbuhimo.
• Further development of another aspect of The Peaceful Peacock:  recipes.
• I am diligently working to de-mystify the process of gluten-free cooking for our 10 month old (we have a history of allergies, asthma, and eczema in the family so we are taking all the possible precautions).  This week I’m researching flour substitutes.
• A tutorial on how to make a simple apron from a repurposed skirt.
• Hooking up with SuperJennyLove to get some ideas in motion for The B Team…your Bozeman Etsy Street Team.
• And of course further development on some products:  a pattern for the Slim and Trim Cloth Diapers, the hand-dyed baby wraps, cute and funky aprons, and sweet little clothespin bags.  I’m not promising that all of these things will make it to the next market, but I will certainly try.

In addition, I’d like to say thank you to all of the wonderful folks who stopped by to chat this weekend in the booth–it’s great to connect with so many of you in the community!  Feel free to drop me a line with any questions about the baby carriers, the rick rack tutorial, or whatever else might be on your mind.  For now my family and I are heading out to the hills for a couple of days for some much needed rest and relaxation.