This all started when my friend told me it was his mom's birthday. We decided to take it upon ourselves to make her a cake. Here's the catch, his mom can't eat gluten. I didn't think much of this. I took a recipe for New York Crumb Cake and we went over all the ingredients, eventually deciding we only needed to buy gluten-free flour. This is not as easy as it sounds.
The first grocery store we stopped at did not carry any kind of gluten-free flour. Safeway was our next best bet. We came up to the flour aisle, overwhelmed by how many different types of flour there were. We eventually came across two packages that advertised gluten-free flour. Having never dealt with this kind of flour before, we were pretty hopeless as to knowing what we needed. The two packages were of the Bob's Red Mill brand. It was the only brand in the store that sold gluten-free flour. There were two kinds, Black Bean Flour and Green Pea Flour. We had no idea what these flours were, we didn't even know what flour with no gluten tasted like. We eventually picked the Black Bean flour because upon reading the back of the package, it said "great for baking!" We took our flour back home and proceeded to make our cake. The first sign where we should have realized something wasn't right was when we mixed all our dry ingredients. The mixture was.. a sort of grayish colour. We didn't think anything of it and mixed in our wet ingredients, greased a cake pan and poured the batter into the pan. The batter was a very dark colour and looked more moist than it should have been. The cake topping was more or less the same colour as the batter. This is when we started to question the flour. The cake was eventually put in the oven. Twenty minutes later the timer rang and out came our wonderful smelling, black New York Crumb Cake. I dared my friend to take the first bite and being the brave soul that he is, took a big mouthful. As he chewed his nose began to wrinkle in disgust. I tried a piece and immediately had to spit the foul concoction out of mouth and drink 3 glasses of water and eat an apple.
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| This is more or less what our cake looked like ^^^ |
When his mom came home, she split her sides laughing when we told her what had happened.
I did some research when I got home and discovered that there are MANY different types of gluten-free flour out there. The most common type of gluten-free flour used in baking is rice flour as this tastes more or less like normal flour. Black Bean flour is used for things like pizza dough and tortilla shells. Green Pea flour is used mostly for making dips. Potato flour is also used for making baked goods.
Here is a guide on what the different types of gluten-free flour are good for..
http://glutenfreecooking.about.com/od/glutenfreeingredients/tp/20-Gluten-Free-Flours.htm
More and more people are going with the gluten-free diet partially due to things like Celiac Disease and also because the gluten-free diet is supposed to help you drop a few pounds. Grocery stores should make gluten-free flour more available to buyers.
For my first time baking with gluten-free flour, having no knowledge about it whatsoever, I don't think I did too badly. Needless to say though, we threw the black cake out. I think I'll stick to my gluten enriched diet thank you very much.
