Gluten Free Baking Website

While searching around on the internet for some good Gluten Free Vegan recipes and tips, I found a really interesting site on Gluten Free Baking:  Gluten-Free Boulangerie.  In case you are wondering …. “Boulangerie [bu.lɑ̃ʒ.ʁi] – A bakery, particularly one which specialises in bread.”

Now, what is the most challenging Gluten Free food?  Not sure?  Aww, come on, its BREAD!!

I love the author ( who, apparently does not want us to know her name!) as she describes her blog:

“It isn’t tradition that assures the survival of bread; it is bread that assures the survival of tradition.”

This is the quote on the wall of a local artisan bakery & café, and it is what motivated me to start this blog. As I wrote in my first post, food can be so much more than just sustenance. It is what unites people at a table, what preserves heritage and family traditions. Bread, in particular, is central to countless food traditions, so much so that in some languages the same word used for bread also means food in general. The impact of gluten intolerance clearly is far more than just missing the taste of specific foods; gluten-intolerant people may end up feeling like they must relinquish the cultural aspects of food as well.

I began to bake because I believe living gluten-free does not have to mean “giving up” anything.

That belief was not always there, though. When I first went on a GF diet, there were very few products available in nearby stores (and even fewer that actually tasted like food). Even as the gluten-free diet gained attention, I was dissatisfied with most of what was available, especially bread; I sometimes got good results baking sweet things from cookbooks, but the bread still didn’t quite seem right. Many gluten-free breads are more of a thick, sticky batter than a dough, and they almost always included significant amounts of eggs, oil, and sugar. I missed bread’s simplicity. I missed kneading bread dough and shaping it with my hands – and I missed slicing into crackly-crusted loaves that were worthy of sharing at a dinner table. And finally, I began to get these things back.

The bread you’ll find here is unlike other gluten-free bread – it has bread’s characteristic complex, yeasty flavors from long ferment times, it requires hand-kneading, and all recipes (starting December 2010) contain no xanthan gum or guar gum! Put simply, it is real bread…just without the wheat.