Introduction
Our test kitchen works for you, our readers, as well as our television viewers, Web users, and radio listeners. We ask for—and we get—a lot of feedback every single day. We send out hundreds of recipes to readers before publication in order to measure their success. We also get plenty of comments about our publications; these include many unsolicited requests, and in the past few years many of you have asked for gluten-free recipes. This book is our test kitchen’s attempt to help home cooks when wheat-based ingredients are no longer in the pantry.
There are many reasons why someone might be interested in a gluten-free diet. Our test kitchen isn’t in the business of prescribing diets or offering up medical advice. We do, however, know how to test our way into foolproof recipes.
You already have hundreds, if not thousands, of gluten-free recipes in your home library. Most vegetable dishes are gluten-free, as are many seafood, poultry, and meat preparations. We didn’t feel the need to include “gluten-free” recipes for roast beef or steamed broccoli. Our mission for this book was to solve more pressing problems faced by the home cook who is no longer eating dishes made with wheat-based ingredients. We identified four goals when we started this project.
DEVELOP gluten-free recipes for favorite foods that typically rely on wheat in some form. In addition to the obvious cakes, cookies, breads, and pizzas, we wanted to tackle recipes like fried chicken (usually made with a flour coating) and eggplant Parmesan (with a bread-crumb coating).
CREATE a versatile alternative to all-purpose flour—an America’s Test Kitchen Gluten-Free Flour Blend. We wanted a blend that could be used not only in the recipes in this book, but as a starting point for reworking your favorite recipes—the ones already in your recipe box.
RATE key gluten-free supermarket ingredients that would make cooking—and eating—easier, including the wide variety of gluten-free pastas and sandwich breads now on the market. We also explored substitutions for pantry staples, like soy sauce, that are typically made with wheat.
TEACH readers about the wide range of gluten-free grains (everything from oat berries to millet) now sold in supermarkets. Many cooks are unfamiliar with these grains, and our test kitchen explains how to buy, store, and cook them, offering up approachable, appealing recipes for the most versatile grains.
As the test kitchen was working on this book, we sent the most important (and most difficult) recipes out to volunteer recipe testers—home cooks like you. In all, we received more than 2,000 written reports from this army of gluten-free testers. Thank you. Your feedback helped identify techniques that needed to be described in more detail as well as recipes that needed to be reworked.
If you have comments or questions about this book, we’d love to hear from you. E-mail us at glutenfree@americastestkitchen.com.