So the Craftsy video I was talking about is done by a guy called Richard Coppedge from America's Culinary Institute - which is basically a technical school for people in catering. He's been working with Gluten free things for a long time, and has also written a book which has very mixed reviews and is now a bit out of date with his current methods but sounds like it has lots of useful recipes in.
His idea is to create flour blends with the right mix of protein and gums to replace Gluten in recipes, which while might be more effective for catering isnt quite as useful (and is pretty expensive) for us casual once in a while bakers so my plan is to adapt his recipe using a ready bought pre-mix of Gluten free flours and then adding the right percentage of proteins/gums needed for the right recipes.
For this I will refer to my good friend Bo Friberg (I don't actually know him, but his pastry chef book is sooooo useful). In his book he explains about bakers percentages - so I'll use that to work out what weights of the protein/gum additives I need.
I think it's probably important to talk about technique a bit here - baking with GF flour doesn't have the same risks as flour with gluten in one sense as over beating it wont make much different with the flour, what it will make a difference with is the Gum's you add. So be careful with that, over mix the gum and you're probably going to end up with a chewy product.
It sounded to me from the Richard Coppedge's book reviews that the recipes were sound, but based on a lot of baking experience and that the techniques used were important to the final product so people who just wanted to throw something together wern't getting much joy out of it.
My first and most dangerous step is to substitute some of the ingredients he uses. I am doing this with the full knowledge that results may change from this, but the ingredients he uses are expensive and hard to get. Depending on the results I might invest in some of those ingredients, but I'm not made of money - neither are most people so I wanted to bare that in mind.
Rather than use Yellow Pea flour (for those of us in the UK there is ONE mill in Scotland that produces this and it's definitely not cheap) I'm substituting with Gram flour which is made with chickpeas - it has a similar level of protein but may have a slightly more bitter taste something I will need to look out for in testing.
Rather than use Guar gum I'm going to use Xanthan gum, because I already have it and it is now very easy to source (you can get it from most supermarkets now). I am aware there is a debate around it, and if I find the recipes work well I think I will most likely invest in buying some guar gum and see if it makes much difference. Guar Gum seems a much more natural product and I havnt heard as many people complaining that it causes them as much problems as Xanthan gum but for now it's what I've got and it should work in a very similar way.
To avoid having to faff around too much I'm going to use a pre-bought flour blend which will either be Doves farm GF plain flour or Asda's own brand (both are pretty similar) which is a mix of rice and other GF flours and starch's.
So at the moment Richard Coppedge is using 2 blends of flour, one high in protein, one with just the gum and he mixes them together to create the right blend depending on the recipe.
His high protein blend looks like this:
412g GF Flours (white rice, brown rice)
340g Starch (potato starch)
71g Pea flour
64g Powdered egg white
24g Guar Gum
His low protein mix looks like this:
714 GF Flours (white rice, brown rice, Sorghum, Buckwheat)
185g Starch (Potato, tapioca)
7g Guar Gum
So you can see quite clearly blend A has more starch, protein and gum to create structure and elasticity where B would be a much more crumbly 'tender' affair - we're talking bread vs cake.
Because the flour blends I will use already contain some starch, I need to take into account that blend contains quite a bit more so I may consider adding some additional corn flour at some point.
So how does this look in bakers percentage? I'm going to ignore the starch for now and lump it in with the flour for simplicity.
Blend A:
Flour and Starch 100%
Pea flour 9.5%
Egg white 8.5%
Guar Gum 3%
Blend B:
Flour and Starch 100%
Guar Gum 0.7%
My scales don't do less than 1g so I will need to round up, but basically for recipes I would have used bread flour in for every 100g of plain flour mix I will need 10g of legume flour (in my case Gram flour), 9g of egg white and 3g of Gum
And for recipes that would have used cake flour for every 100g flour I will need to use 1g of xanthan gum.
Realistically there will be recipes that will combine the 2, for example his pancake recipe called for a ratio of 3:5 of mixes A and B so very roughly per 100g I'd want to use around 4g Gram flour, 3g of egg white and 2g of Xanthan gum.
This is all looking very precise so I'm afraid those teaspoons and tablespoons might have to retire and it's time to invest in some digital scales.
Just for reference his Muffin mix used a ratio of 1:1 so you'd want to halve it, the same for pie crusts and also the non enriched bread recipe. So we're talking for 100g plain GF flour - 5g Gram flour, 4g egg white, 2g xanthan gum. Remember we're having to round up the 0.5gs so if you're using a larger measure say 200g then remember to calculate from scratch as numbers will be quite different otherwise.
I found a copy of his recipe for pate a choux online which used his old formula's for the flour blends but seemed be a ration of 1.5:1 of equivalent blends so rounding up we'll call it 2:1 - 100g plain GF flour, 7g Gram flour, 6g egg white, 2g xanthan gum.
Phew.
Next time - Some actual experiments to see if any of this actually works!
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