I’m a baker, as you probably know. I’ve regularly made bread, cakes, pies, and all sorts of things for friends and family. About a year ago, someone in the family was diagnosed with a severe allergy to gluten, and within days we removed all gluten products from the kitchen, began to be very selective about restaurants we ate at, and generally had to rethink a number of aspects of our lives as a family.
This had a big impact on my baking, to put it mildly. With the aid of some excellent gluten-free general purpose flours (mostly the ones made by Bob’s Red Mill) certain kinds of things could be readily made the way I used to make them (more or less – you quickly notice you have to increase moisture content a bit because such flours are more absorptive), such as scones, biscuits (American), and basic pastry, but other things really needed to be seriously re-thought, or abandoned altogether rather than make a terrible facsimile of it (particularly yeast breads, especially light fluffy loaves or buns, light cakes, anything that needs the structure gluten provides to rise and form a crumb, etc…)
For almost a year I just removed a lot of the baking I do from regular rotation, and resigned myself to not making certain kinds of things any more. It was a very painful goodbye (I’ve been baking breads and cakes for many decades), but I was fine with it, given the life-threatening health issues I’d seen gluten cause, up close.
At the same time, I began to be increasingly stunned by the situation concerning gluten-free bread and bread-like products you can find on sale. While some good breads can be found (with persistence), so very much of it is entirely, in the eating, devoid of joy, much of it is sometimes like eating solidified ash. But still they charge you huge amounts of money for it. I’ve seen all kinds of mediocre loaves of bread up or near (sometimes beyond!) the $20 price point, and people buy it without (it seems) batting an eyelid. Why? Because it is hard to find, and (I thought!) hard to make.
But it isn’t hard to make! Well, maybe it is hard to make some of the stunningly joyless products on sale in some supermarkets and bakeries, but what I learned a few months ago (which it is not exaggerating to say transformed my life) is that there’s an actual magic ingredient that can be used to replace the role of gluten that really truly allows me to make all the kinds of breads I’ve made before, and so good that they are indistinguishable from (and in many ways even sometimes even better than) the wheat based breads one can routinely make or get! I’m not talking about Xantham gum, which is something I’ve experimented with a lot, and which has its place as a structure aid. I’m talking about psyllium husk, which I began to pick up on some discussion of here and there online, but could not get a read on until I found the website The Loopy Whisk (TLW).
After reading at TLW for a bit I realized that my wife had told me I might like to look at the site many months before, so I felt a bit silly, but continued to read and decided to try some of these “sounds-too-good-to-be-true” recipes myself. Surely the superlatives the author (Katarina Cermelj) uses to describe her results must be over the top? I had some hope because, as a chemist, there was a very sensible approach to the process of experimentation she clearly went through to discover her recipes. Moreover, her description of the recipes and explanation for why she does certain things the way she does them filled me with some confidence that she might be on to something. The key to it -the magic ingredient- is (as I said) psyllium husk, which when you add the right quantity of water to it, produces a gel or suspension that forms the basis upon which all the usual processes of rising and forming a good network of bubbles, etc., can take place. You can read more at the site.
I have to say that the results are stunning. Not a single recipe has disappointed so far, and everything is extremely straightforward to do. Regular readers of my social media output will have seen photos of some of the results. I am now back to regularly making lovely sliceable sandwich loaves that rise spectacularly and are full of flavour (and don’t taste like ash), and a variety of other kinds of breads. While her flaky pastry recipe is similar to one I’d already found elsewhere, her tweak with a bit of extra Xantham gum, as well as her process for how she handles the incorporation of the butter was a helpful improvement. For sure I’ll be experimenting with her cake recipes soon as well.
So here’s the mystery. Why is this not more widely known? If more people knew the kind of gluten-free bread you can quite straightforwardly make (following a good well-researched recipe like those at The Loopy Whisk), there’d clearly be nobody buying the (often awful) stuff you get out there at the crazy prices they charge. I’ve mentioned the role of psyllium husk in baking to other people with gluten-free households and it has come as news to them. I even mentioned it at the offices of the local gastroenterology practice and their nutritionist (they give advice to patients and families newly joining the gluten-free community) and they had not heard of it either!
I find it remarkable that in this “Information Age” we’re supposed to be living in, something so vital that can make such a difference is simply not cutting through the noise. And it’s out there for free – you can just go to Katarina Cermelj’s website and try her recipes! (She’s also got a new book out collecting much of her knowledge into one place, which I recommend, although I rather like the convenience of the website too.)
Anyway, I felt I needed to take a bit of time and write this to mention her website, and her hard work, which has been utterly transformative for me, restoring to my life my much loved regular practice of baking bread. I suspect there are many others who feel the same way, and if you are needing to (or wanting to) give up on gluten and want to know how to not give up the joy of eating breads and other baked goods (or know someone who could use information on gluten-free — also dairy-free, vegan, and egg-free), I strongly recommend spending a bit of time at The Loopy Whisk.
Happy Baking!
–cvj