gluten-free eats

This prompt is for any holiday, celebration, or observance—for any time of year—if there's food you associate with it, now's the perfect time to share.

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe, product, or resource and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

Monthly prompts are only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can post whatever you like to the comm whenever you like as long as it meets the community guidelines.

And, a reminder, you can now tag your own posts.

Here's what's going on in the comments:

• Christmas Kugelhopff from dray
• Anyone got a recipe for an egg-free GF Kugelhopff? asking for a friend :D
• Cheesecake in a Loaf Pan with Coconut Crust from violetsugar

It's time for the big show. Our prompt for August is the main dish.

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe, product, or resource and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

Monthly prompts are only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can post whatever you like to the comm whenever you like as long as it meets the community guidelines.

And, a reminder, you can now tag your own posts.

Here's what's going on in the comments:

• Slow cookers and A Year of Slow Cooking from harmonic_tabby
• Meatloaf from dray

Dairy-Free Gluten-Free Baking Cookbook: 75+ Delicious Cookies, Cakes, Pies, Breads & More, by Danielle Fahrenkrug:

Very much DFGF 101, complete with maternalistic classroom helper tone. The fact that Fahrenkrug's URL is DelightfulMomFood dot com should tell you everything you need to know there. I personally was turned off by her attitude about "healthy" eating and insistence that this diet is good for everyone. Also she brings up God at one point, refers to children as "little mouths," and seems to think the ideal texture for a bagel is "fluffy." Basically there's just too much Fahrenkrug in this book for me.

But what about the cookbook part? Despite being aimed at beginners, I'd be reluctant to recommend this to newbies as parts of the introduction are so simplistic as to be almost inaccurate. But it does have an entire chapter on troubleshooting, which is a big part of DFGF baking, and the index is thorough and lets you browse by main ingredients.

And the recipes? The book covers breakfast; yeast breads and rolls; pizza, flatbreads, and crackers; cookies and bars; cakes and quick breads; sweet and savory pies and fruit desserts. Most use a flour blend, either one of three that Fahrenkrug has developed as 1-to-1 substitutions for wheat flour, or there are five commercial blends she recommends for use in her recipes: Bob's Red Mill GF 1-to-1 Baking Flour, Krusteaz GF AP Flour Mix, Pamela's GF Artisan Blend Flour, King Arthur's Flour GF Measure for Measure, and Authentic Foods GF Multi-Blend Flour. Her own basic mix contains brown and white rice flour, tapioca and potato starch, sorghum flour, arrowroot starch, and xanthan gum, and she offers substitutions for the potato starch (corn starch) and xanthan gum (guar gum or powdered gelatin).

The weirdest ingredients I saw in here were coconut milk powder, powdered egg whites, and powdered gelatin. Otherwise it's the usual gluten free flours, starches, and thickeners, and generic calls for dairy free milk, yogurt, and butter. The pizza dough uses psyllium husk, but none of the sandwich bread, flatbread, or cracker recipes do. The sandwich breads include instructions for bread machines.

Despite her emphasis in the introduction on the importance of weighing flours and starches in GF baking, her recipes are only in US customary volume. They have descriptive headnotes and storage advice, but the only photographs are at the beginning of each chapter.

It's so hard to find useful gluten-free dairy-free cookbooks, and I do appreciate that these recipes call for specific flour blends you can make at home, thereby reducing the number of variables you're dealing with, but not including weight measurements introduces yet another variable. Because if adding an extra tablespoon of flour can bring a recipe to perfection, accidentally adding in an extra quarter cup of it is going to lead to ruin. Plus I really struggle to get excited about a recipe if I can't see a photograph of the finished product, especially for GF breads.

If this is all you can get, take what you can get out of it, but I'll be sending it back to the library.

I got this chocolate chip cookie recipe straight from Otto and used Otto's own cassava flour for it, as there's reportedly a big difference between the grind of different brands. The cookies are grain-free, nut-free, gum-free, and I made them dairy-free with Miyoko's vegan butter. And they're shockingly good for all that! Crisp on the edges, soft in the middle, not a speck of grit, and they hold together perfectly even without any gums.

I used my stand mixer to cream the block of softened vegan butter into the sugar, then followed the recipe exactly, scooping the dough with a #40 disher (~1.5 tablespoons) and cooking it for 10 minutes. Unchilled, the dough spreads a reasonable amount in the oven, giving you a round, thinnish cookie. From the fridge, the chilled dough takes more like 12 minutes and doesn't spread out quite as much, which I prefer. The dough also freezes well, but I thawed it out in the fridge before baking. If you're cooking from frozen, they'll probably need an extra couple of minutes tacked on. If you're using real butter, cooking times and cookie spread will vary.

When eating these warm from the oven, there's a slightly weird flavor, which must be all the cassava flour. I preferred the taste after they'd cooled, even on into the next day or two. The recipe seems to suggest you should underbake the cookies to ensure they're soft in the middle, but I recommend actually baking them, since that distracting flavor is worse if the dough is undercooked. If you like your cookies crisp all the way through, just give them an extra two minutes in the oven, and they'll stay nice and crispy for days.

If I make these again I might experiment with swapping out a little of the cassava flour for a higher protein flour like oat or millet, just to make them more hearty, but if this recipe suits your dietary needs, it's fantastic as written.

It's that time of the year again! When it's whatever season wherever you are, and our prompt is seasonal foods.

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe, product, or resource and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

Monthly prompts are only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can post whatever you like to the comm whenever you like as long as it meets the community guidelines.

And, a reminder, you can now tag your own posts.

Our prompt for April is Comfort Foods!

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe, product, or resource and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

Monthly prompts are only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can post whatever you like to the comm whenever you like as long as it meets the community guidelines.

And, a reminder, you can now tag your own posts.

Here's what's going on in the comments:

• Brazilian Cheese Bread from Cheesebuddy from mergatrude
• vegan pasta with cauliflower cheese sauce from reeby10

Almond Flour Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough: I picked up this package of bake-it-yourself cookie dough because it's grain-free. I'm not a huge fan of almond flour, but I was hoping because it was in a blend it wouldn't have the usual almond flour characteristics (nubbly, greasy, almondy (honestly it felt like I hit some shell once or twice)), but it does. Still, I persisted. The chocolate is nice and there's a lot of it, and the cookies were the right amount of sweetness for me, though the coconut sugar gives it that burnt marshmallow flavor I like in burnt marshmallows but find distracting elsewhere.

The cookie lumps don't spread on their own in the oven, so I flattened them with a spatula after about ten minutes and then let them cook about four minutes longer. They bake up chewy on the edges and nice and gooey on the inside.

I have other DIY doughs I like better, but this is a decent vegan paleo chocolate chip cookie. Miss Jones also has a keto version. I found these at my fancy local natural grocery store.

Current Ingredients: Grain-Free Flour Blend (almond, tapioca, arrowroot), Coconut Sugar, Chocolate Chips (unsweetened chocolate, chocolate liquor, cane sugar, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, vanilla), Coconut Oil, Water, Coconut Flour, Vanilla Flavor, Salt, Baking Soda, Cream of Tartar.

Our prompt for February is paleo-friendly!

A paleo diet is based on foods that could have been obtained by hunting and gathering back in the olden days and typically includes lean meats, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, and typically excludes dairy, grains, and legumes, though there is some variation in how people practice it. For our purposes, tagging something paleo-friendly means it's—at the least—free of dairy and grains. (Though some consider ghee (clarified butter) paleo, so that's why the tag's paleo-friendly; the hope is that it'll be amenable to changes that suit your particular needs.)

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe, product, or resource and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

Monthly prompts are only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can post whatever you like to the comm whenever you like as long as it meets the community guidelines.

And, a reminder, you can now tag your own posts!

Here's what's going on in the comments:

• Paleo Leap (and their 3-ingredient paleo almond butter cookies) from mergatrude

Happy New Year, fam! Our prompt for January is What's New. Have you recently learned something that makes gluten-free living easier? Tried a new recipe? Perfected an old one? Finally gave that weird new snack at the store a try? This prompt is for new things, even if it's only new to you.

To fill this prompt, you can:

1. Slide into the comments of this post and share a link to a recipe, product, or resource and why you like it.
2. Write up a favorite recipe and post it to the comm.
3. Post a review of a related product or cookbook to the comm.
4. Try someone's recipe and reply to their post (or comment) with any changes you made and how it turned out.

Monthly prompts are only for inspiration and not a requirement. You can post whatever you like to the comm whenever you like as long as it meets the community guidelines.

Here's what's going on in the comments:

• Franz deli style gluten free sourdough bread at Costco from runpunkun
• vegan gluten-free chocolate pudding from rosefox
• Update on Sweet Loren's Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough from runpunkrun

I found Sweet Loren's Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough in the dairy section at my local Kroger analogue, and after my recent success with Trader Joe's Super Chocolatey Gluten Free Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough, I was excited to branch out in the world of preproportioned cookie doughs.

Like TJ's, you get 12 pucks of cookie dough in a package and can bake on demand. It also says you can freeze the dough. I baked them straight out of the refrigerator for about 18 minutes, and got thin cookies about two inches across, with crispy edges and a chewy middle.

I found these odd. The cookie bit is weirdly grainy, like it has cornmeal in it. Maybe it's oat chunks. It also has a hearty flavor, probably again due to the oats and maybe the molasses. Kind of a homestyle vibe. The chocolate is very nice and kind of softens the cookie experience, but there isn't enough chocolate to make up for its grittyness or its unusual flavor.

These are vegan and soy free, though! And Sweet Loren's has more than a dozen different kinds of cookie doughs, though I think my store only had one or two.

Update: These are a lot different after they've cooled. My initial review was based on cookies that were about ten minutes out of the oven. Two days later, cookies from that same batch weren't as gritty and their flavor was less bold. So for the next batch, I took them out of the oven and let them sit for 30 minutes before eating them, and I liked them a lot better.

Current Ingredients: Flour Blend (oat, tapioca, potato starch), Sugar, Palm Oil, Chocolate Chunks (sugar, unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter, vanilla, salt), Filtered Water, Molasses, Natural Flavors, Sea Salt, Baking Soda.