The First Annual (Virtual) G+ Bloggers Conference - Gluten Free Recipe Development

You're going to need a nap.

Hey there, how you doing today? I'm Chef Dennis Littley and we're in session 3 of our virtual bloggers conference. I started to say food bloggers, but it's not just about food blogging, it's a bloggers conference with all the different things we have to offer. Although we are talking about food in this session and a specific area of food. And last night at the cocktail party I was talking about, I said I don't want to call it a fad I don't want to call it a trend because it's really becoming more of a way of life, and I think you're going to find a lot, lot more people going gluten-free for various health reasons and just because, you know, I think it is a better way to eat, and myself included, I need to start learning more about it. So I thought, you know, food bloggers, we blog about food. People are going to ask us, "How do I make that gluten-free?" And rather than saying, "I don't know," I thought maybe we'd go to some of the people that really make good gluten-free products and ask them how they go about developing their recipes and how they make the changes. So I'm gonna introduce our panel right now, and starting to my side, I have Janice Mansfield. Hi, Janice. Thanks for being here today.

Hi.

Thanks for inviting me.

You're welcome. We have Dr. Jean Layton. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks. Thanks for inviting me.

And we have Jody Stewart.

Hey, Dennis. Thank you very much.

Okay, so we're gonna start, and what we're gonna do as we go is let me remind you to, if you have questions, ask them in the comment bar and we will get to them as soon as we can. Uh, if there's anything specific you'd like to know about products or how to do a recipe adjustment or just anything in general about gluten-free. And, uh, we're gonna let each one of the panelists speak, uh, for a little while and talk about their philosophies or how they go about doing things, and then we'll open it up to a Q&A after that. So I'm gonna turn it over to Janice Mansfield right now, and we're gonna let her talk about gluten-free. There you go, Janice.

Okay, so I'm, I'm Janice Mansfield, and I do a lot of gluten-free baking, so it's great to see that there's a lot of interest. And we were just talking before we went live about how this is, in my opinion, this is a really exciting time to be involved in the whole area of gluten-free cooking and baking because there's so many new products coming on the market in terms of ingredients. You know, we're discovering flours that have been used by other cultures that are naturally gluten-free, that produce really interesting tastes and textures that maybe we're not accustomed to, but are really, really interesting on the palate. And there's products that, you know, may have been used for things like feed, for example, I'm thinking of things like Timothy grass, where people are kind of re-examining them and looking at their potential as gluten-free flour options and playing around with them. So there's lots of stuff out there, and this is, if you're into learning something new every day, there's something new to learn every day in the field of gluten-free cooking and baking. So that's just my little food geek preface there. In terms of gluten-free cooking, I do a lot of cooking for my client base. I do personal chefing as well as gluten-free baking, and every client I have has multiple food sensitivities, so I do a lot of food substitutions. I get people requesting not just gluten-free but egg-free and dairy-free and soy-free and corn-free and The combinations of things that they're intolerant to or can't have in their diets varies from individual to individual. So I get to tinker a lot, so that has the advantage of letting me test the limits of what very few ingredients do in a lot of different forms. So for instance, things like flaxseed, we typically incorporate into gluten-free baking in meal form, and sometimes soaking the flax meal, but I also use them boiled. I boil the whole seeds and you get this lovely gelatinous goo that you can actually whip and aerate and use as binding properties both in savory and baked items. So some of the recipes that I developed kind of take on some of those things, but For everyday cooking, I guess, for the people who are new to gluten-free, my biggest piece of advice would be start with recipes that you know work already. So if they are a wheat-based recipe, there's some easy substitutions that you can make with some really good quality gluten-free pastas on the market, for example, so if you're making a pasta dish, Look for some of the high-quality products that are on the market. There's some excellent gluten-free corn and rice pastas that are made out of Italy. They're making some fantastic products. And so those are really easy substitutions. So a lot of the dishes that you're already familiar with are, at least on the cooking side of things, are fairly easy to replicate. You can use things like sweet rice flour to thicken gravies and make rouxs. Very, very similar to the ones that you would make on the wheat-based front. Baking can be a little more difficult, a lot more difficult, because there's science involved, and I typically approach recipe development on the gluten-free side from a couple of fronts. One is I do adapt recipes, wheat-based recipes, that I know work, but generally I convert everything to weight measures rather than volume measures, and then start substituting in flours based on the kinds of properties that I want the finished product to have. So a bread, for example, would require something with a higher protein content and a little more sort of structure to the flour than, for instance, a cake, which you want to be light and airy. A muffin can have a little more bounce, so you can often use the same blend of flours that you would use for a bread for a muffin, but you'll end up with something a little chewy on the cake side of things. Typically, if I'm making a flour blend, I will use a combination of 50% starch and 50% flour kind of as a starting point., and then go from there. And that seems to be a good mix. I don't like to go any more than about 60/40, 60% starch, 40%, because you start to lose the nutritional value. So that's the danger, is you can produce beautifully flavored and textured products with a high proportion of starch in your flours, but then you lose a lot of the nutritional value of what you're eating, which kind of defeats the purpose. You want to have both. You want it to taste good and also be good for you. So I tend to use combinations of flours that include legumes in some proportion, up to about 25%, because they provide some bounce and structure, but there's other flours out there like teff flour that's high in protein, amaranth and quinoa are high in protein and give you some of those properties. And really it's a matter of just going, even as simple as going to the health food store and looking at the array of flours on the shelf and start to familiarize yourself if you are wanting to do a lot of baking from scratch. If you're new to it, my biggest piece of advice, and you're not a scratch baker to begin with, my biggest sort of piece of advice to get you rolling would be maybe find a good mix, find a good off-the-shelf mix and make up a couple of batches of muffins, make up a couple of cakes, coffee cakes or something like that. And start to familiarize yourself with sort of the taste and the textures of the cake batter as it looks, and when you follow the directions, and then you can start to jump off from there in terms of developing your own recipes. So the other, the other approach that I take to developing recipes is to start from scratch, and I'll use ratios to do that. So Michael Rudelman has a fantastic app that you can get for your iPhone. The book is, is that he wrote a few years ago is a really fantastic resource for anybody who's doing a lot of cooking and recipe development. And I've got a few other ratios that I've stashed, but a lot of the basic ratios for things like pie crusts, for muffins, all work with gluten-free flours. So in terms of, you know, the proportions of dry to fat to eggs to liquid, just remember sugar is a liquid.

Alright, great. Thank you very much, Janice. That was very informative. I'm gonna move on to Jean now. Jean Layden, could you take it please?

Hi, I'm Dr. Jean Layden, and I am known throughout the world of social media as Gluten Free Doctor. I'm a naturopathic physician, which is a physician who's trained just like any other doctor for the first 2 years, but then we stay in outpatient management with patients. So we work in herbal nutrition and supplements and food. We do 25 more hours in our training than most physicians get. And my background— before I became a physician, I was a chef in New York City working for a major caterer. So I have this food background and I have the doctor background. And when my husband broke his leg and discovered he had osteoporosis at 42, was able to take all that knowledge and acknowledge that he has celiac disease. He has a family history of all of the incidental manifestations of celiac, and we were able to get that tested out and verified by experience, by taking him off of gluten and experiencing the vast changes in his health. When that happened, I went gluten-free as well. I had been wheat-free all the way through med school. 'cause I know my body doesn't react well to wheat, but I went all the way to gluten-free, so I took out rye and barley as well, and all of the ancient wheat sources—spelt, kamut—at that point, and a whole series of side effects cleared for me as well. And our daughters were 6 years old at the time, and we had sent them off to school like every other parent with sandwiches and cookies in their lunchbox. Unlike most parents, I had actually been measuring my daughters' height every single month on their birthdate, and they plateaued as soon as they got into school. They stopped growing, and that's not a common thing for a 6-year-old. And when Ed broke his leg, it was March. We took them into a gluten-free diet at the same time. By June, when they had been on the gluten-free diet for over a month, they had started to grow. They grew 3/4 of an inch that first month and continued that pace till they were back to an average height. So that's 8 years ago. I've been writing gluten-free. My gluten-free blog is glutenfreedoctor.com, and I am the co-author of Gluten-Free Baking for Dummies of the John— Wiley series, you know, those yellow and black books. When I did that work, I tried to make it really simple because part of the concern that people have with gluten-free baking is that you have to combine flours. You can't just grab one bag off the shelf and be done with it. You have to create the structure that wheat has, the protein content, the fiber content, carbohydrates to be able to have it work in a recipe, and none of the gluten-free flours have all those components at once. They have to have bits and pieces of different components combined to create the mix. So I created two mixes for the book. One is an all-starch mix that's, um, it's sweet rice flour, tapioca flour, and potato starch, and the other is my whole grain mix which is brown rice flour, millet, sorghum flour, and sweet rice flour. And throughout my book and ever since I wrote it, all of my recipe development has moved into using those two mixes in various proportions to get the texture, the quality that I want. And having those two mixes like permanently on my shelf makes it super simple. Because I can go whole grain, like with the muffin. Most of my muffins are incredibly healthy muffins. They're whole grain. I might throw in some almond flour. You know, the moistening aspects of muffins can be things like sour cream or yogurt or dairy-free yogurt or applesauce, just to create that structure. But starting out from whole grain, it's still a good breakfast for my kids. They're now 14 and they're athletes, so I'm feeding growing and developing bodies that need a lot of nutrition all the time. When I started to create gluten-free recipes, I had to start from traditional recipes. So like Janice, I went back to my recipes that I knew worked every single time in wheat base, and then worked backwards knowing the taste, knowing the texture, knowing the techniques, worked backwards to re-replicate it in gluten-free. Everything works in gluten-free and the only things I have not been able to recreate are two: phyllo dough, I've never found a good phyllo dough, because it's next to impossible to get the windowpane effect that you have to have to, to make phyllo dough, phyllo dough. You can get really thin pastry, but it's not phyllo. And the other one is croissant dough. And I think I'll have a croissant dough probably by the end of the summer because I'm still working on getting it absolutely to that thin layer of pastry butter, pastry butter that comes from all the folding techniques. I promised that one to one of my daughters ever since we went gluten-free, so I really need to pay off. Yeah, so if anybody has questions about those aspects of moving from a traditional recipe into a gluten-free, and the other side of it is you have to know what your ingredients are. The cross-contamination possibilities are the biggest concern I have when I see a non-gluten-free blogger writing a gluten-free recipe. It's silly stupid things like tarragon vinegar has barley malt as its sweetener. So if I see somebody making a potato salad with tarragon vinegar and I don't see it specifying a brand name that I know to be gluten-free, I know that recipe developer doesn't understand the nuances So ask us about the nuances because we know how.

Great. Alright, thank you, Jean. We're gonna move on to Jody now. Jody? Alright, Jody, you're— are you muted again?

Yeah, I'm unmuted now. There you go.

Okay, great.

Okay, um, hi Dennis and hi Janice and hi Jean and everybody else who's watching. I'm Jody. I've been gluten-free for 10 years. In addition to homeschooling my 4 kids, I run NoGluten.me, a gluten-free beginner's guide. My family moves and travels a lot, so I've had the opportunity to live all over the world and see how other cultures use naturally gluten-free ingredients to develop gluten-free recipes. So I'm just gonna give you a little overview for people who are watching and really have no idea what gluten is. You're gonna find more information in, in Jean's book, and I've got a list on my website too. But gluten is a protein in some grains like wheat and rye and barley, and people with celiac disease and gluten intolerance and some other conditions can't eat it. The things you're gonna find in ingredients in your kitchen that have gluten are wheat flour, bread, cake, malt that Jean mentioned, most soy sauce is fermented with wheat and has gluten, and a lot of processed foods contain gluten. So like things like canned cream soup will have a wheat thickener and will contain gluten. A little bit of background on me, totally different from the other ladies, When I went gluten-free 10 years ago, I knew how to cook a little bit. I relied a lot on processed foods. So when I cooked supper, I would put pork chops in a pan and pour cream mushroom soup over top of it, or I'd make a pasta casserole. So when I went gluten-free, I wasn't really familiar with cooking from scratch. I didn't know how to look at a recipe and determine if it was gluten-free. I didn't know how to look at a recipe and tinker with it to make it gluten-free. So when I write, right now I'm writing the resource that I wish I had had 10 years ago, because that's a position that many people are in right now. They're new to gluten-free, but they're also new to cooking from scratch because they've, they've had to start because they've gone gluten-free. So people who come to my site are looking specifically for recipes that are labeled gluten-free because they, they don't know how to identify it on their own and they don't know how to tinker with the recipe and make it gluten-free. So as food bloggers, we're experts in working with ingredients and recognizing ingredients. So it's great that there's so many people signed up that want to use their skills to reach the gluten-free community. So what I've done is I've gone through a lot of the blogs of people signed up, and I've picked a few that— a few recipes to go through and just give you an idea of how to develop your own recipe. To reach a newly gluten-free audience. So the first one— I better do a screen share here. The first one is from Brooks Walker from Cake Walker, and this is blackberry glazed ribs. Now, it looks amazing. His ingredients are all gluten-free. So this is a gluten-free recipe. It's an example of using naturally gluten-free ingredients to create a gluten-free recipe. Now, all you would need to do right now to reach a newly gluten-free community is just to label it as gluten-free. And so when people come to your site, they see, okay, this is a gluten-free recipe. Now, the second one is this one, Dion Baldwin, um, at Try Anything Once. This is arroz con pollo, and it is also gluten-free. One of the things you would want to do for someone who's newly gluten-free is beside here— can you see this? Beside here, the chicken stock, if people are using a canned or packaged chicken stock, just include a note that says something like, "Check and make sure your chicken stock is gluten-free," because if people aren't comfortable making their own, they might pick up something that's flavored with with barley malt or something. Um, now the next one, sometimes you have a recipe that's almost entirely gluten-free, like cheesecake. Ah, this is Chef Dennis Littley's cheesecake. And cheesecake is my favorite food because it is gluten-free. Except for the crust. So all you would need to do for this is just put a note that if people want a gluten-free version, they just need to substitute gluten-free graham crackers or gluten-free cookies into the crust. All right, the next way you can do this Okay, the next thing that you can do is take a regular recipe and then just make a completely new version of your recipe, a completely new gluten-free version. So here We have Kristen Baker's Grasshopper Magic Bars. Now this one is perfect for people who are newly gluten-free and people who are new to cooking because it uses a cake mix as a base and cookies. So all you would need to do, you could do a whole new blog post on this, um, gluten-free magic bars. And just make, make it with a gluten-free cake mix and take a different kind of cookie and make it with a gluten-free cookie. So completely new blog post, but just a remake of something you've already done. Alright, now the, the last, the fourth way you can develop a gluten-free recipe is is to take a gluten-free flour and create a gluten-free baked good specifically from gluten-free flours. When people are visiting NoGluten.me, there are people who have had to start cooking and baking because they've gone gluten-free, so I've developed a couple rules for my recipes. I only use one type of flour per recipe. I try to stick with flours that have names that people recognize. So I'll use rice flour because people know what rice is. And my recipes don't require any technical skills. So I have like no pie crust and no, no cream puffs, things like that would take some effort to make. So there is chemistry behind using the different flours, but instead of giving you a whole rundown, I'm just gonna let you know what I do is I find a base recipe that really works, and then I alter it to several different variations. So I've got 4 types of things that I generally use. I use rice flour, coconut flour, nut meal and nut butter, and then I use a starch. So I use these all independently. So rice flour is my favorite to bake with because it's cheap and because you can buy it almost everywhere in the world. So if I have a reader from Thailand or China that can't find something that's common here, they can go to a grocery store and just pick it up there. I use it in quick breads and muffins and pancakes, generally I'll add some, some mashed fruit to it because it's dry and the mashed fruit gives it, you know, a nice texture. And I'll use a lot of eggs in it because the eggs bind it. So my chocolate chip banana muffins are pretty a pretty good example of kind of the base recipe. So lots of bananas, lots of eggs, only 2 cups of rice flour for the whole thing. Um, the coconut flour, I like coconut flour because even though it's expensive, you only use a little bit of it in a recipe. So, um, I can use half a cup of coconut flour and get a dozen muffins out of it. If I add mashed fruit and chopped fruit to a recipe, I can get, say, two dozen muffins out of it. Nut meal and nut butter and mashed legumes, that's another favorite because you can get nuts anywhere in the world, and if you want to make your own nut meal or nut flour. You just have to grind them really fine in a blender. And Janice was saying that other cultures have used legumes and different flours, and this is like, I'll think I'm being super creative and make something super amazing and then find out, you know, Koreans have been doing the exact same thing for 1,000 years. So I've got a mung bean pancake that I thought was just brilliant, and I looked online and Yeah, it's not an original at all. So they're really easy to work with. If you look on the back of the Kraft peanut butter jar, they've got that a cup of peanut butter and a cup of sugar and an egg, and that makes a cookie that tastes like a cookie. So you can use a nut meal as a replacement for flour. And then the last material I use is starch. And this is something else that other cultures have used for years that I just didn't know about before I started cooking. Like, there's a Passover crepe that's made out of potato starch that tastes like a crepe. You just use like, I think it's like half a cup of potato starch per 2 cups of water and an egg, and you've got crepe batter. So if you haven't worked with atypical flours, I'm just going to mimic the suggestions of the other ladies. Find a few recipes online or look at our sites and find a base recipe that you know works for us, um, and then experiment with it and see how it works. Now if you are not familiar with coconut flour and it's really expensive, There's one more resource here. It's Lori Clark on My Gluten-Free Girlfriend has an amazing variety of— I'm trying to catch it— amazing variety of gluten-free coconut flour mug cakes that use very little coconut flour but give you a really good idea for how coconut flour works. Now, that's how I develop recipes for gluten-free beginners. Now, if I don't have a chance to address something in the questions, you can find all my contact info, or you can message me, or you can find all my contact info on www.nogluten.me. Great. Very good.

Thank you very much. We've gotten quite a few questions here, so we're gonna start getting into them. Actually, we've had a couple. Heather King wants to know if there is a brand of gluten-free all-purpose flour that you recommend and what types of gluten-free pastas. I think you did talk about that, the Italian corn and other ones, but is there a gluten-free flour that someone— that you can start with?

They are all different because, and really it's a matter of finding what your taste buds like, so all of these different gluten-free flours have a slightly different taste. Some of them have a little more legume in them than others, which I find some people don't like. Some people don't really like the taste of millet, others do. Some people kind of don't like the taste of sorghum, and that can be incorporated into a lot of gluten-free flours. But some of the more sort of all-purpose tasting ones that I've tried are the King Arthur All-Purpose Flour Blend is actually a really nice blend that lends itself well to a lot of different applications. It doesn't work well in breads, but it works really well for— I've tried it with cookies, pie crusts, muffins, cakes, and it did a pretty good job with producing a tasty product for all of them. And that's, I think, fairly widely available through the States. It's a little harder for us to get up here in Canada. Pamela's is producing an artisanal flour blend that I think is a little nicer than their sort of previous all-purpose blend. And then Bob's Red Mill makes another one that's a pretty good blend. It's a little heavier on the legume, it has a little higher garfava flour content than some of the others. So I don't mind that myself, but I know some people find it can be a little bit beany tasting.

It works beautifully for bread because of that bean content. Yeah. The Bob's Red Mill. So the reality is I don't use any of them because I made my own mixes, and I think for most people after a certain amount of time you're either going to make your own mix or you're going to choose the flours that the flavors work for your family. The ones that I stay away from are the ones that are all starch. Like the cup for cup. I don't use it because it's got no nutrition in it at all. It's all tapioca and potato. It has xanthan gum. That's part of it for my family. My husband reacts to xanthan gum and guar gum with the exact same response as he gets with getting glutened. I don't use a lot of commercial gluten-free products mixes because of the xanthan gum component. I use a mixture of chia seeds, flax seeds, and psyllium husk that I call Pixie Dust, and I use it in everything that I make, and it creates that same beautiful bubbly structure, holds it well, and it can be used— I saw on one of the questions somebody was asking about egg replacer. I use the Pixie Dust because that replaces the structure of eggs. As well.

Is that from the flaxseed?

It's from all of them because the flaxseed creates one strand of protein that kind of holds a larger bubble, but the chia seed kind of goes in between the strands and creates tinier bubbles. Now, instead of having just one protein strand holding the flour on the outside, you've got multiple. The psyllium husk, it boosts the fiber and it It's magic. That's why I called it pixie dust.

We had a question from Brooks Walker. He wants to know, uh, Jean, does a gluten-free diet have an advantage metabolically in terms of blood sugar spiking?

Depends on how you're eating, because the reality is if you have gone into the grocery store and replaced all of your gluten-full foods with gluten-free replacement products, no, it is not going to metabolically help at all because you've replaced with almost total starches. And the reality is, if you eat most of the easily accessible gluten-free products, you're actually eating a much higher refined starch diet. If you're gonna go on the other hand and eat whole foods like a piece of fruit and whole grain quinoa and whole grain sorghum and whole grain teff, you're gonna do a great job of controlling your blood sugar, but you're not gonna do it if you go and just replace it with, you know, a hamburger bun for a hamburger bun and pasta for pasta. It's not gonna happen.

More of a lifestyle change than just changing out your gluten-free flour. You have to watch the carbohydrate level. You did touch on it, but Evelyn Red Cross had asked, "I have trouble with gluten-free without milk and eggs." She's a vegan. Usually my baking will not rise properly.

Yeah, it's really hard to work. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is. The dairy, the dairy you can replace fairly successfully with non-dairy alternatives like almond milk or soy milk if you're okay with soy, or coconut milk or some of the other— there's a whole range of non-dairy milks on the market, and you can buy often yogurts that are made from them, or it's fairly easy to make your own yogurt if you're fairly restricted. It's the eggs, it's the eggs are really the magic, and I find depending on what you're baking, because eggs do something a little different in every recipe, so they do something different in cakes versus versus say you're making a meatloaf. You know, so sometimes they're binding, sometimes they're leavening, sometimes they're providing a little bit of fat to enrich your recipe. So you really kind of have to step backwards, and that's where developing the recipes gets a little bit harder, is you have to understand kind of the mechanics of what's going on with your recipe. Which for some of us is fun and exciting, but for other people who just want to get some muffins on the table, it's a pain in the neck. For cake, I actually use a combination of, sort of most often, I actually use psyllium soaked in water with a combination of a little bit of extra applesauce. And some extra baking powder to provide a little bit of extra leavening. That seems to give me kind of the closest to an egg-like texture.

If you're just looking for something that's sweet, look at Raw Vegan Resources for their desserts because they're like usually gluten-free and dairy-free and egg-free, but you still get like something really sweet. You can get like a raw vegan chocolate cake that's made with ground nuts and dates and chocolate.

The other thing is, if you're trying to replace both dairy and eggs, realize you're changing the fat components in your baking drastically. And if you replace that fat with something that you can use, be it more oil or one of the dairy-free spreads or one of the shortening products, you can still create a beautiful egg-free, dairy-free product. I mean, I have on my blog, there's a fabulous dairy-free pie crust, you know, and making a gluten-free pie crust with no butter is not easy, but it's not hard either if you choose the right product. And I'm just going to give a shout out to a friend of mine who writes a gluten-free vegan blog because she's figured this all out and all of her recipes work. That's Stephanie Weaver in Recipe Renovator. Go check her out. She does beautiful work, and it's all vegan, so no eggs, no dairy.

Great to know. She is a really nice person, too. I've spoken with her a few times. Actually, someone from Philly area, Allison Kramer, is also a gluten-free vegan. I thought it was really unusual, but now there seems to be more and more cropping up again with the need for gluten-free. We had a question from Jennifer Stahl. She says, "Does anyone have a recipe for gluten-free graham crackers that doesn't involve chickpeas?" She's in Germany and they don't have anything like that there, and seems like she's gotten a reaction to chickpeas now.

There's one in my book. There you go. Yeah, I'm not allowed to release the ones that are in my book on my blog. That's one of the parts of the contract. So you can get the book in Germany, I know. Okay, great.

Okay, let's see, we had another question here. Nuances. Jean Layton, thank you for bringing up nuances. I'd like to get some suggestions for where I could go to double-check that items are indeed gluten-free. It would never occur to me that tarragon vinegar contains gluten. I know that the produce from my farm share is gluten-free. Free, but it's the other things like fish sauce, sherry vinegar, baking powder that I'm unaware of the gluten status.

Okay, here's where you get to have some fun because there is no definition by law in the United States of the term gluten-free. There's still no labeling restrictions of any sort. So you can look on the package to see if the words gluten-free exist. And that'll give you the beginnings of your understanding. There are certain groups that actually check that gluten-free status, and those are the ones that if you're brand new, I encourage people to look for those, those status symbols. The celiac organizations, both of the celiac organizations have their own little labels. The other side of it is learn what what the other names for gluten can be. So barley malt is a huge one, and barley malt is the one single reason that Rice Krispies were not gluten-free for years until they finally took the barley malt out. So wheat in the United States has to be labeled on the label with the parentheses wheat because that's one of the top 7 allergens. It's seeing whether or not there's rye or barley, and those two do not have to be labeled independently, and those two are what creates the cross-contamination frequently. Soy sauce is a huge cross-contamination because, like Jody said, most of them are gluten-full. So if there's a product that's like a dressing, or a glaze, or a barbecue sauce, and it has in it soy sauce and doesn't say anything more than that, it's a gluten-full product unless it's got the certification seal from somebody on it. So where I refer people to— I have a list on my blog that I update every quarter, but the two celiac organizations maintain lists as well. They give you all the crazy chemical names that are derived from gluten. The problem is if you're searching on the internet, the internet doesn't have a clean sweep kind of redo when information has been disproven. So you're gonna see things on the internet that have been running around for decades and they are no longer correct or no longer believed, but because the internet never clean sweeps, you will still come up on it. You'll see things like blue cheese has gluten in it, and it's been disproven, unless it's a particular type of Roquefort that typically costs around $25 a pound. Every other blue cheese, the spores in the blue cheese are not there when it finally gets to market, so it's not a gluten-full product. You'll see crazy things like envelope steaks, paste is glutenful, and that's not true. So you have to find a good source. I refer back to the two gluten-free groups, celiac.org and celiac.net.

Yeah, and same, same here in Canada. We do have labeling laws now in Canada. I think they came into effect in October of last year, but the issue is is in order for something to be labeled gluten-free, it has to be tested as containing less than 20 parts per million of gluten, and some people have reactions when they encounter levels of gluten below that. So even though you, so consequently it's kind of that gray area where you, even though something is labeled gluten-free and been sort of approved by the Canadian Food Food and Drug Administration agency, you still may need to know whether something has traces of gluten in it, and I just echo what Jeanne said is that you kind of, it is a bit of an education process to understand kind of what all the hidden, hidden sort of code words are for where things may contain gluten. Modified starches is kind of another big one. When you look on a lot of very canned and frozen products. And the other thing I, Jean, you touched on it, is get to know where the products that you're purchasing are manufactured and packaged, because those can be sources of cross-contamination. So even if something is naturally gluten-free, but it's repackaged into smaller bags, for example, in a facility that's also packaging wheat flour, your spices or your rice flours could potentially be cross-contaminated, kind of without you being aware of it. So we're finding here that more manufacturers are quite happy to be open about their, about about sort of the supply chain, about how their product is handled at all points, right, from harvesting, growing to harvesting, to packaging, to retailing. So, and it's, that's the nice thing about the internet is it is easier to find and contact companies directly to ask them about how they're handling their products.

There's a lot of concern about the phrase that's on the back of a lot of— a fair amount of gluten-free products, packed in a facility that's also packaging wheat. And quite honestly, in my point of view, if it's in a package that tells me that from a major manufacturer, I'm actually more comfortable with that than hearing that the local bakery cleans their equipment on Mondays and runs gluten-free on Tuesdays and then goes back to running gluten-full on Wednesday. I know that bakery is cross-contaminated, and I don't care that they call it gluten-free-er, it's still not gluten-free. Yeah, so I'd rather see the notice on a package knowing that if a manufacturer is saying that that they're doing a different kind of a clean every time they change their run. And they're working to a different level. I still don't encourage people who are newly diagnosed to eat those things because there is a possibility that there's a trace of flour. And it's 20 parts per million, so that means dosage-wise to make someone sick, it's toast crumbs. It's toast crumbs on a bar of butter that somebody, you know, cut butter, put it on their toast, went back and got another slice, and the toast crumbs that are on the butter are going to be enough to make the next person sick. Mm-hmm. Okay, I mean, it's really, really small doses. So for people who are writing gluten-free and have never done so, if you're not absolutely certain about it, Send me an email, send one of us an email and just let us run through it with you because it will only take you a few times before you realize that I've got to check chicken stock, I've got to check soy sauce, I've got to check barbecue sauce, I've got to check baking powder. Some baking powders actually have wheat starch in them, others don't. Spices, McCormick spices are all gluten-free if that helps anybody in the States, those are gluten-free spice.

Company. But I know one thing that was a surprise for me was that some of the French fries I was buying were coated with flour to make them crispy. I was like, just what I need.

Any of the ones that are seasoned— and that's what I tell people— is things like potatoes are gluten-free, but as soon as there's a seasoning coat on it, flavoring coat of any sort, all bets are off. So plain is good. Flavored, not so good. So potato chips, I mean, some potato chips are fine. Fritos are fine, but not that you want to eat a Frito, but if you have a bunch of 14-year-olds like I do—

You might want a Frito.

I was a Girl Scout leader for 9 years, and I ran a troop that had 2 gluten-free kids, a soy-free kid, and a dairy-free kid, and 9 children. So we had a lot of food imbalances or alterations we had to do, and to be able to hand a child a Frito bag and dump in the chili on top and sprinkle on the cheese that they could eat. They want to be able to eat things like everybody else. Sometimes you'll let the junk food go by.

Yep, absolutely. Alright, we had a question from Carolyn Hurley. She wants to know, "Do rice flour and coconut flour measure cup for cup compared to wheat flour?" No. I didn't think so.

No, I actually have a chart on my website, realfoodmadeeasy.ca. I have a chart that gives weights and measures of, or the weight-volume conversions of a bunch of gluten-free flours. It's not exhaustive, but there's probably about 20 or so of them on there. And yeah, that's why I weigh things. Roughly a cup of wheat flour is about 140 grams roughly, but if you put 140 grams of coconut flour in something, yeah, it's not a cup for cup substitution. No. Okay.

Yeah, weighing it actually gives you breads or pastries that turn out. If you just scoop, you're never gonna be able to convert well. It's much easier to do it by weight, and I have a conversion chart on my blog and in the book as well. And yeah, so the hard part is it varies based on the grind of the flour, and it varies based on the moisture content of the flour. So if you're in the Pacific Northwest like we are, our flour is way more because there's more flour, or there's more water in our flours.

Yeah, brown rice flour is one of those where it matters hugely what the grind is. You'll get completely different results, and there's about 2 brands that I've encountered of brown rice flour that produce a superior product, and almost all the other brown rice flours I've tried are very gritty textured. And so it's, I mean, it's good to know that ahead of time if you're new to the world of gluten-free baking, because it can be really discouraging to, you know, get really excited about producing something, go out and spend, you know, what's a fair amount of money to invest in the flowers and then sort of produce something that's not nearly what you had in mind. We've all done a lot of that testing and eaten hockey puck muffins. I have anyway.

I know I have, and I'm not gluten-free, just for the record.

So I can hope that and, you know, people can benefit from my trial and error.

Okay, we have a question here from Kim Pebly, and it's for Jodi. It says, "Can you please tell me more about making mashed legumes and how you use them?" Oh, hey Kim!

Yeah, if you look for black bean brownies, that's an excellent example of how to use mashed legumes in baking. They sound weird, but they actually turn out really well. And non-gluten-free people will make them on their blogs too.

Very good. Kim also asked a question, she said, "A while ago, a green banana pasta was mentioned in the gluten-free community. Has anyone found that yet or heard anything about it?" It's coming, it hasn't hit the market yet.

It was up at Expo West in March, so typically things that are introduced at Expo West take anywhere from 2 to 3 quarters to come out It's coming. Personally, I thought it was interesting but not the texture I would expect of an Italian kind of pasta. I'd much prefer the brown rice pastas you can get from Italy like Jovial or the corn pastas you can get from Sam Mills or that kind of— the green banana pasta was interesting.

So there are some good gluten-free pastas. I know there was one comedian on, and one of his things was he didn't know what gluten was, but evidently it was delicious.

And he's right. Yeah.

The other thing was that he had cooked gluten-free pasta, but it seemed like it took like 2 days and it still wasn't done.

So you can, you can actually soak it ahead of time for up to up to about between 30 and 60 minutes, and that actually helps the cooking. So one of the issues with some of the gluten-free pastas is the outsides cook before the insides cook, and so you end up with it gummy on the outside but still well beyond al dente in the center. And if you— it was actually the Ideas in Food couple that run the blog Ideas in Food, so they actually did a battery of a series of tests with initially wheat-based pasta, but they like to tinker, so they ran through a whole series of gluten-free pastas as well, and it actually helps hydrate the noodles, and it actually cuts down the cooking time so that really all you need to do is plunge it in boiling water long enough for the starches on the outside to gelatinize and then you end up with beautifully textured gluten-free pastas that you can hold as well if you're cooking ahead of time for a large number of people.

My favorite gluten-free pasta alternative is just to look at the other cultures. I use rice stick noodles for spaghetti and mung bean noodles for like an angel hair or pasta salad or something like that. I find they cook so much better than most of the gluten-free free pastas, but I think it's Sam Mills that makes little duck-shaped pasta, and those are really good too.

Yeah, and their spaghetti is quite good, and then there's a couple of Italian brands, and as with the wheat-based Italian pastas, it's all about the dyes, right, that they spend a lot of time and money on producing really high-quality dyes that the pasta is extruded through, and that makes a big difference.

Talking about that, that's a good question. Now I know, I know that from selling in years ago how, how, you know, I used Del Cecco, and one of the things is they've got these dyes that were from the beginning of time that they're still using. Now if it was a dye though, would it hold any residue? Is there any way to really clean it, or would these have to be brand new dyes that gluten-free pastas were—

No, these are exclusively gluten-free facilities, so these pastas are exclusively gluten-free, and the only things that are going through those are gluten-free pastas. Good. And they're labeled, they're fairly clearly labeled on the package themselves. Very good.

That's one thing to remind people, that if you're using gluten-full equipment or equipment that's been used with gluten flour and then you're trying to make a gluten-free cake to take to a potluck so you know your neighbor can eat it, Be really incredibly careful. Most of your bakeware, you can't just go ahead and use it because if there is any seam, like at the bottom of a springform pan, there's any seam that can hold flour, that's enough to make somebody sick.

Or at the top of your beater where the things hook on. If someone makes me gluten-free food in their gluten-filled kitchen, I won't be able to eat it.

Yeah, yeah, and that's really a challenge for me. That for me was one of the main reasons why I have made the conversion now. So all of the baking I do is gluten-free, all of the catering I do is gluten-free, and all of the personal shopping. So basically everything that comes— the only thing that comes into my kitchen now are gluten-free options. And that's even with having separate equipment. I had a separate stand mixer, I had separate baking pans, I had separate mixing bowls, and cutting boards and anything plastic kind of was kept separate, and I had— but it still was a source of anxiety. So it's—

and another thing you have to watch is—

straightforward, but it's harder than you think.

Another thing you have to watch is from bulk bins. Like in Canada, they have a big chain called the Bulk Barn, but— and they sell gluten-free flour flours in the bulk bins, but at night when they go to clean them, they open all the bins and then they take a duster and they just dust into the bins so that if the gluten-filled pizza crust is right beside the gluten-free pizza crust, gluten-filled pizza crust goes into the gluten-free pizza crust bin. So you could get sick just by eating a gluten-free something from a bulk, bulk store.

And the other thing is, even things that are naturally gluten-free, if it's grown in the right place, it's gonna get cross-contaminated in the field. So when you get lentils, take the lentils you buy, and I don't care if it's in a package or if it's in a bulk bin, and just lay it out on a cookie sheet and look at what's in that, because there's almost always some wheat berries in your lentils, or there's a different bean in your lentil. So you have to be incredibly careful about cross-contamination in bulk bins. I encourage people, you only buy packaged products. There's one store in town in Bellingham, the owner of the store is gluten-free, or actually his wife is celiac, and so he handles his bulk bins in a very different manner and they're safe. But in general, you shouldn't be buying from bulk bins, period, even though it's a little cheaper.

We have a question here from Evelyn Red Cross.. And it was, "How much chia do you replace xanthan with?

Is it 1:1?" When I replace it, it's a combination of chia, flax, and psyllium, and it's on my blog at glutenfreedoctor.com/pixie-dust/.

So that is the pixie dust then because Ashley—

That is my pixie dust, yeah.

Dionne Baldwin asked about that as well, so she can get that off your blog then. Great.

Yeah, and I'll go in and I'll type comments under the comments so people will have it, but I don't want to do it while we're on the air.

Okay, there's a question from Paula Montenegro. The issue here in Argentina is the price of gluten-free products and the lack of control. It has her wondering how gluten-free something really is. Well, I guess it's not a question, it was just a statement. I'm sorry, but I guess that's something really you have to think about too. If you know something's not available and you see it available, you gotta wonder, well, where are they getting it from.

And in terms of the cost, I don't know kind of what the arrangement is in Argentina, but here in Canada you can write off, if you have a diagnosis from your physician, you can write off some of the costs, the additional costs of your food when it comes tax time.

Really? You can do the same in the United States. But the problem in the United States is it first has to be beyond that 7% limit of being able to itemize your medical deduction, so that's problem one. And the other thing is you have to actually maintain records of what you purchased, what the standard product would have cost, and the difference. So if you go out and buy a loaf of bread, you can pick whatever loaf of bread that you would have bought conventionally, and then the difference between that and the gluten-free loaf you bought, and that's the conversion. It's a fair amount of bookkeeping. It is a lot of work. But for some people, you know, like a family of 4, it starts to make more sense. Absolutely.

Alright, well, this has been very informative. I mean, I learned a lot more again, and especially about the cross-contamination even as a chef and being careful, there's things there that I wouldn't have thought about. So, you know, it's good to know rather than before I made my niece something that I might have been making her sick. So, you know, it's really an eye-opener with a lot of the info and a lot of the stuff that you ladies presented today. So thank you very, very much for your time today and for coming on. You guys are great. Rock.

Well, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.

Thank you, Jeanne, for being here, and Jodi, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for including me.

We're having a great time. This is the third session of the virtual conference. You guys are all making history with me today as we're the first virtual conference that there is on Google+. I'm sure we're going to see a lot more after this, but we're doing it today.

You're blazing the trail.

That's it, I'm blazing the trail. Trailblazing. I got 3 more to go today, 3 more today and 4 tomorrow, and we'll have it behind us.

You have somebody bringing you food in the meantime.

Actually, just a little food runner. I texted my wife because she went out, she knew I would be at the computer all day, and said, can you please bring me something? I have time between 5:15 and 5:30 to eat. Hopefully she will. Alright guys, so thank you, Chef Dennis Littley, here with the Virtual Bloggers Conference, and we're gonna be coming up with session 4 in just about 57 minutes, and that is our YouTube session. So I hope to see you then. So thanks again and have a great day.