If you have celiac disease, then you know that you have to eliminate gluten from your body so you can get healthy again. Gluten is like poison for your body now – it destroys parts of your small intestine, causing all sorts of symptoms that prevent your body from absorbing nutrients from your food. Thankfully, you can find lots of gluten-free recipes on the internet. There are recipes for everything – even gluten-free bread recipes! I bet you never thought you'd be able to have bread again, right? Wrong! All it takes is using a different kind of flour in your gluten-free recipe and you're good to go.
Flour Alternatives
Luckily, there are lots of flour alternatives for anyone who has to stick to a gluten free recipe. Potato starch flour is great for sauces and cream-based soups that usually use wheat flour for thickening. Just mix in a little potato starch instead of flour with the recipe, and it becomes gluten-free as simple as that! Just remember to cut the amount in half. Potato starch can be found in most health food stores.
Tapioca flour is a very light, smooth flour that is best used in gluten-free recipes where you want a chewy texture. It's perfect for recipes for white or French bread. You can even easily combine it with cornstarch or soy flour. Soy flour tastes very nutty and is a great source of protein and fat. It's best used in gluten-free recipes that call for it to be combined with other flours. It also makes great brownies.
Cornstarch comes, of course, from corn. It's great to use as a thickening agent for sauces, puddings and Asian cooking. Like soy flour, it combines well with other flours when you want to use it for baking. Corn flour is excellent for using to make pancakes or waffles and it can be blended with cornmeal to make cornbread or muffins. Cornmeal, like corn flour, is used for pancakes and waffles but can also be a good choice for baking a cake and still sticking to a gluten-free recipe.
There are other types of flours as well, and all of them are perfect for gluten-free recipes. They're easy to find at health food stores.
Gluten Substitutes
All baked goods use wheat flour because it contains gluten. Gluten keeps pies, cakes and cookies from falling apart and keeps air trapped, giving baked goods that great texture. Because you need to retain this structure even when baking without wheat flour, you have to add a gluten substitute like xanthum gum, guar gum or pre-gel starch. Like the types of flour above, it can also be purchased in health food stores. If you use all of these alternatives in your gluten-free recipes, you'll be able to eat delicious food and stay healthy!
