I recently purchased a bunch of amazing books related to food politics, baking, and cooking, and am waiting eagerly for them to all come in the mail! I received a few of my books already, and one of them Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, by Michael Ruhlman, has changed my outlook on gluten-free cooking and baking, and I have decided that I absolutely need to purchase a kitchen scale before I go any further with my baking endeavors. The author introduces the concept of ratios, explaining "A culinary ratio is a fixed proportion of one ingredient or ingredients relative to another. These proportions form the backbone of the craft of cooking." (p xi)

Ratios are extremely important in baking because they determine whether a recipe will yield pancakes or crepes (varying the amount of flour in the recipe), drop cookies or cut-out cookies, or a light and fluffy or dense and rich cake. A HUGE problem underlying all gluten-free cooking is figuring out correct ratios. In gluten-free baking, all sorts of different types of flours can be used as substitutes for wheat flour; in my pantry right now, I have white and brown rice flour, mesquite pod flour, soy flour, almond flour, millet flour, chesnut flour, 'sweet' white sorghum flour, garbanzo bean flour, chickpea flour, cornmeal, oat, and buckwheat flour. Each one of these 'flours' is simply the ground form of some kind of seed, pod, or nut. 'Flour' may be produced from things such as ground tree pods (i.e.,mesquite), seeds from a cereal grain (i.e., oats), or seed from a non-cereal grain (i.e., buckwheat, which, contrary to its name, does not contain gluten). The wide variety of gluten-free flours is very exciting because each flour has its own distinct flavor and unique qualities which might make it compatible in some recipes, yielding a delicious cookie, muffin, or cake, or detrimental to others (i.e., contributing to flat cookies, quick breads that don't rise, etc.).

I am still fairly new to the gluten-free baking world, but at the beginning of my baking endeavors, I couldn't really understand why it was nearly impossible to only use one type of 'flour' in a gluten-free recipe (I admit, I did attempt to bake with only brown rice flour a couple of times, and I have only found one cake recipe that actually works using only one type of flour, and this is because the flour is not doing any of the grunt work in the recipe, the eggs are really the backbone of the cake). I now know that a combination of flours is required to "replace" the wheat flour in most recipes (however, I don't regard it as "replacing", I like to think of it as creating a whole new, exciting, different recipe that compliments the flavors and textures of gluten-free products).

Here is the **one** recipe that has ever worked with only one type of gluten-free flour (slightly modified from About.com)

Gluten-free German Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:

4 ounces sweet German chocolate
6 eggs, separated
2 cups sugar, divided
1 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups brown rice flour
2 tbsp corn starch
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Separate your eggs into yolks and whites; put the whites in a large bowl, and the yolks in a smaller bowl (make sure your eggs are at room temperature for maximum fluffiness when you beat them; if they aren't at room temperature, you can place them in a bowl of warm water first to bring them to room temperature).

Create a double boiler on your stove (a pot with boiling water with a bowl on top) and melt the chocolate.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, cream the butter and 1 1/2 cups of the sugar together. Add the vanilla and egg yolks. When this mixture is nice and creamy, add the chocolate, and stir until everything is a uniform consistency.

In a separate bowl, combine the following dry ingredients and sift until uniform consistency: brown rice flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and cornstarch.

Add the dry mixture and the buttermilk to the butter/chocolate mixture alternately, beating until smooth. Set aside.


In another bowl, beat egg whites until frothy. Add the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and beat until stiff but not dry.

Carefully FOLD the egg whites/sugar mixture into the rest of the ingredients. This helps make the cake nice and fluffy and delicious! If you beat the ingredients at this point, you are beating the air out of the egg whites, and defeating the purpose of beating them in the first place, so DON'T DO IT!

Pour batter into three 8-inch springform pans lined with parchment paper, and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes or until cakes are done.

Let cakes cool completely before frosting!


Anyway, back to talking about ratios, which are even more important to pay attention to in gluten-free baking because it is simply impossible to substitute "other" types of flour for wheat flour in a 1:1 volume ratio. Gluten-free flours have different textures and weights; one cup by volume of wheat flour does not necessarily weigh as much by volume as one cup of a gluten-free flour. Therefore, when you are baking, the proportions of dry ingredients to wet ingredients will not be correct. According to my ratio book, "a cup of flour can weigh anywhere between 4 and 6 ounces", but the author is only talking about wheat flour (p. xvii). When you get into the gluten-free realm, there is a much greater range of weight for a certain volume of flour (I will explore and write about these different weights as soon as I get a kitchen scale).

Ruhlman explains, "One of the facts underlying the universality of ratios is that they are based on weight rather than on volume measurements." (p.xvii) The weight of a certain volume of a given ingredient may be affected by many things such as the amount of moisture in the air (and thus the amount of the air's moisture that has been absorbed by the given ingredient), or how firmly you pack ingredients (a cup of lightly packed dark brown sugar will weigh less than a cup of dark brown sugar packed very firmly). Thus, in gluten-free baking, we must really pay attention to the weights of the ingredients that we are using. I believe that this is one of the keys to unlocking the mysteries of baking with alternate ingredients.

So, what does this mean in the context of this developing blog? This means that my homework is to go do my research on kitchen scales and find one that suits my needs, buy it, and start weighing and experimenting!

I have always loved science experiments (from testing the pH of my fish tank as a child, to the volcano with baking soda and vinegar in fourth grade, to my AP Chemistry experiments my senior year of high school), so I turn this into one big experiment. I plan to study and learn as much as I can about all of the different types of gluten-free flours out there, where they come from (what types of plants, where are they grown, etc.), how much they weigh per unit volume, how they taste, how they smell, and how they interact with other ingredients.

The challenge is to tackle all of this while still keeping up with my job (working in the bakery at Cornell- no, it isn't gluten-free), school work (I am taking seven courses plus gymnastics and three credits of independent study), running as much as I can, spinning poi, designing two outfits for the Cornell Design League fashion show this spring, practicing yoga, helping Coco with his leatherworking and learning as much as I can about leatherworking, and working on Bob's farm as soon as the weather warms up.... YIKES!

this is going to be a wonderful, wonderful journey!!!