It’s hard to realize that it’s been over twenty years since I started exchanging recipes with five of my writing students who were also gluten intolerant or allergic to wheat. I never dreamed this would be the beginning of my writing a series of cookbooks. After all, I was the worst cook of the group. It was pride that forced me to the stove to keep up with the others, and my doctor’s orders of sticking to a strict gluten-free diet that made me search for more interesting recipes.
This was before the introduction of xanthan gum and the first recipe for yeast-rising rice bread developed in the University of Washington diet kitchens, but I still remember my cravings for breads, cakes, and cookies, most of which had to be filled by the ubiquitous puffed rice cakes. If anything would force one to seek tastier fare—even to the extent of learning to cook—the thought of a permanent diet of rice cakes surely would.
When I finished my second cookbook, More from the Gluten-free Gourmet, I thought I had given my readers all I could learn about cooking, living, and traveling gluten free. I realized the recipes were rich, fattening, and sometimes hard to prepare, but they tasted so good a celiac shouldn’t be tempted to stray from the diet.
To my dismay, readers begged for more changes. “Your recipes are turning me into a whale. Can’t you cut the calories?” “I only have time to cook some of your recipes on weekends. Why don’t you give us some
quick and easy ones?” “Help! I am allergic to rice. Aren’t there any recipes for bread or cake that don’t start with rice flour?”
Finally, my doctor issued a challenge directly to me: “Your cholesterol is far too high. You’ve got to lower it.”
That did it! Three egg yolks in every loaf of bread had to go. Cheese in every casserole must be cut. Extra eggs in cakes should be eliminated somehow. I learned to make a low-calorie yogurt cheese for my cheesecakes—which I refused to give up. In my books, I’d blithely told my readers to follow the directions for “lightening” food given in magazine and newspaper articles. When I tried to take my own advice, I found only part of it worked. Yes, butter could be replaced by vegetable oil to cut cholesterol, but there were still too many calories for the woman who didn’t want to turn into a whale. And, to my dismay, replacing fat with applesauce often turned our cakes into puddings. Rice flour just isn’t as amenable as wheat flour when it comes to lightening. This led to a lot of cooked messes sliding down my ever-hungry garbage disposal. In fact, there was one cake that tasted great but simply wouldn’t firm up until, thanks to a persistent tester, we made nine sets of changes in the formula.
As for the requests for “quick and easy”—I could understand that cry. For the first ten years of my diet, I, too, had worked away from home with no time to prepare a leisurely casserole from scratch and little time for shopping for unusual ingredients. I was already working out ways to cook in less time, using shortcuts of prepared mixes and bases. You’ll find many of them in this book.
But the biggest plea was still to be answered. Aren’t there any other basic flours for us but rice? I found indeed there are when, a couple of years ago at a conference in Canada, I was introduced to “new” flours made from beans. Of course the use of beans and lentils in cooking is not new, but bean flours that actually could be used in baking were a marvelous discovery for me. They taste great, are higher in fiber, and will give us all a change of diet, since I have worked out formulas to use these new flours without any rice flours.
I found a Canadian bean flour made from cranberry or Romano beans very good for making cakes or bread and worked with it along with a second bean flour available in California, a mix of garbanzo and broad
beans. This California flour is lighter tasting, and if the eater isn’t told, he or she seldom guesses that the cake, pie crust, bread, or pasta contains bean flour.
The addition of variety to our diet from the many recipes using bean flour will not only be excitingly different but will help those who want to rotate their grains. A warning, though! The sudden addition of huge quantities of legumes into the diet might cause some gastric distress and flatulence. Thus, introduce bean flour (as you would any new food) with care and in small quantities in the beginning. If you enjoy it as much as I do, it will not be long before you are using it as often as the rice flour for your basics: bread, cake, and pasta.
This has been an exciting book to write, but a difficult one. I was working with a lot of new formulas requiring much testing and, to my dismay, much discarding. Could I satisfy my readers with tasty food they could serve to the whole family, as I do, and also serve with pride to guests? Would the ones who demanded “quick and easy” be satisfied with some of the twenty-minute meals, the many shortcut mixes, and the whole new chapter of stir-fries? Would those who couldn’t tolerate rice accept the bean flour substitutes?
I leave it to you readers to see if I succeeded. I hope you can use these recipes, as you’ve used the others, for the whole family and for guests, serving them with pride and no apologies for eating “gluten free.”
B.H.