Our favorite gluten-free chocolate chip cookies use one and only one kind of flour! Read on to get the recipe.
If you or someone you love needs to avoid gluten, you may know the challenges of baking without the magic of the binder that makes tender cakes, fluffy biscuits and flaky pie crust. I’ve learned a lot since our family started our GF journey several years ago. Read on for our story and my top three tips for gluten-free baking.
When my youngest daughter started high school, I began to notice a change in her.
Anna’s normal exuberance was often replaced by fatigue. She would opt to stay home instead of hanging out with her friends. She said “no” to most activities. She complained of digestive troubles. Always a picky eater, she often avoided eating altogether until she became ravenous and ate a lot at once. Because I didn’t find any evidence of illness, I attributed her withdrawal to teenage angst and the stress of high school.
The summer after her freshman year, we took a family trip and her digestive problems increased. We drove from Dallas-Fort Worth to the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. On the way we stopped in Memphis to spend the night, finding a great restaurant through Trip Advisor that served the GREATEST RIBS EVER. Central BBQ’s ribs have a smoky, peppery dry rub that makes them addictive. Anna loved ribs but refused to go into the restaurant. She felt too sick to eat but had no fever and wasn’t throwing up.
The Smoky Mountains were breathtaking, and we enjoyed hiking in the national park, driving part of the Blue Ridge Mountain scenic byway, tubing on the Ocanaluftee River and visiting the Biltmore House. But Anna stayed in the car for some of those hikes and meal time remained a struggle.
When we got back home to Texas, I took her to the doctor for the digestive complaints. He didn’t find anything and prescribed an acid-reducing medicine. Several weeks later, Anna still felt awful and confined herself to her room much of the time. We went back to the doctor and he sent her to a gastrointestinal specialist at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth.
The doctor there ordered a battery of tests. One of the blood tests checks for Tissue Transglutaminase IgA antibodies, which when present in high levels indicate celiac disease. Anna tested positive for celiac, a genetic autoimmune disorder.
Here’s more from the Celiac Disease Foundation: “When people with celiac disease eat gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye and barley), their body mounts an immune response that attacks the small intestine. These attacks lead to damage on the villi, small fingerlike projections that line the small intestine, that promote nutrient absorption. When the villi get damaged, nutrients cannot be absorbed properly into the body.”
Read more at https://celiac.org/celiac-disease/understanding-celiac-disease-2/what-is-celiac-disease/#s6kovbAhHdJMvB0O.99
This means that a person with celiac can be extremely malnourished even when eating normal amounts of food. Anna often said she felt like she was rotting inside, and she was right.
The only way to confirm celiac is to perform an endoscopy and a biopsy of the small intestine. Anna’s doctor told her to keep eating gluten until after the endoscopy. Dr. Hunt showed us a photo of Anna’s intestines. The walls of the pink tube were smooth and shiny when they were supposed to look like shag carpet, a classic indicator of celiac. Her autoimmune reaction had destroyed the “shag carpet” villi of her intestines, meaning they couldn’t absorb nutrients. She advised Anna to go ahead and cut out gluten even before the biopsy results were available, which confirmed the diagnosis.
Anna started to feel a little better after a few weeks, but it took about six months on anti-nausea medicine before she returned to her dynamic, fun-loving self. Fortunately for those with celiac, eliminating gluten from their diet restores the digestive system to normal.
Anna has no trouble staying away from gluten because she doesn’t want to feel that awful again. She still mourns not being able to eat Babe’s fried chicken (if you live in DFW, you know Babe’s) or doughnuts and cheese sausage rolls from the shop around the corner, but she finds restaurants and recipes that provide delicious options.
Going out to eat can be fraught with anxiety, so we seek out reviews on the “Find Me Gluten Free” app.
We are fortunate her diagnosis came at a time when the gluten-free craze was in full gear. If it had come five years earlier, it would have been an even bigger struggle.
Now I’m always on the lookout for yummy recipes for GF cookies, cakes, breads and more. That’s what prompted me to get on Pinterest. I’d been avoiding the trap of another time-sucking social media site, but it rocks for the sheer volume of recipes.
Because celiac changed how our family eats, I’m passionate about sharing GF recipes, tips and just the challenges of the journey.
Now that you know the “why” behind the gluten-free focus for Plum Prairie Ranch, I’ll share with you my top three tips for gluten-free baking:
- Use oat flour in drop cookies and bars. Oat flour is a game changer, folks. When Anna and I first started making GF cookies, sampling the dough made us glum. Rice flour and some of the other common flours have a slightly gritty texture, as if someone sprinkled sand in with the brown sugar in your chocolate chip cookie dough. For the best consistency, you need a blend of flours (often rice, tapioca, almond, corn starch, sorghum…you get the idea). When you use oat flour, you just need—wait for it—oat flour! AND, even better, the dough is miraculously free of grit (yes, I know I’m not supposed to sample raw dough, but I’m a bit of a rebel). I use Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free Oat Flour. The cookies taste great and it’s easier to prepare. Here’s a link to the recipe, Yammie’s Gluten Free Simple Chocolate Chip Cookies, that brought about this revelation.
- When it comes to cakes or bread, follow the recipe EXACTLY. Baking is all about chemistry and GF baking can be much trickier than baking with wheat flour. I’ve made cakes where I used the hand mixer and didn’t pull out my Kitchenaid stand mixer or didn’t beat the batter for as long as recommended. Or I didn’t sift the flours. I’m still too gun shy to try a GF angel food cake after I didn’t beat the batter well enough and the bottom quarter of the cake was a rubbery tire tread. But when you follow a complex recipe to the letter, you can get absolutely delicious results. We tried this lemon pound cake from Gluten-free on A Shoestring as an addition to our pies for Thanksgiving dessert. It had such lovely taste and texture that we never missed the gluten.
Flanked by a pair of pies, this delicious GF lemon pound cake was a big hit at Thanksgiving.
- In my experience after more than three years of GF baking, the time in the oven is almost always longer than in traditional baking. Sometimes it’s two minutes. Other times it’s ten. Just be prepared to check frequently with your fingertip and toothpick.
That’s all I’ve got for now, so if you’re on a gluten-free journey of your own, feel free to share your favorite tips and recipes.
P.S. If you follow Plum Prairie Ranch on Pinterest, you’ll find some of my favorite GF recipes.
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