Using gluten-free flour in pastry

Faith

This is more of a technical question than anything. Say you're making pastry or scones or similar, where you only knead lightly to avoid the gluten developing too much and making the product tough. What would happen if you used gluten-free flour*? I'm guessing you could end up with quite a crumbly final product, but I'm interested if anyone has a better understanding than I do.

*I'm referring specifically to a gluten-free flour, as opposed to a different type of flour.

0lddog

Hi Faith

If you do a google search : pastry site:coeliac.ie

you may pick up a sense of what others have found

(Id do it myself but for the limited capability of the thing Im posting with)

confusticated

I bake with gluten free flour a fair bit, and have tried out different kinds of flour, different methods, and different types of baking with it. I've pretty much given up on scones to be honest, the dough is quite crumbly as you suspected, and I can't get them to be as fluffy and light as normal scones no matter how much or how little I knead them, they come out kind of tough and dense. It seems to make a denser bake in all formats - queen cakes are denser too with gf flour, and pastry is difficult to keep together because it's so crumbly when you roll it out. I had tried to add extra egg white - maybe oversimplifying things but it would add protein, which gf flour is missing, and you need a bit more liquid with gf flour anyway I've found because it just doesn't seem to absorb it or combine with it as easily. That helped a bit but not much, it was alright for the pastry.

In the last year or so I've started using xanthan gum and that seems to make it behave a bit more like a normal bake - I made pastry for mince pies with it at Christmas, and I usually include icing sugar in that which was previously a disaster with gf flour because it wouldn't hold together at all, and they came out perfect. Still needed a little more care than the normal ones but were pretty much the same once cooked. Wouldn't attempt a gf recipe now without including the xanthan gum.

Sorry for the wall of text, but hope that helps! To actually answer your question, the kneading doesn't seem to make much of a difference but I think that's because the flour behaves so differently to normal flour anyway that the effects of the different flour mask it.

Faith

Thanks confusticated, that's really helpful! I have a bag of GF flour in my cupboard that I was wondering about using up, and a friend who tries to avoid gluten coming to stay soon, so I was thinking of trying to make southern-style biscuits with the flour. They're like savoury scones, and need very little mixing or they get tough. Seems like they'd just be crumbly and would fall apart potentially, and I'm not willing to go to the effort of buying xanthan gum when she's not coeliac .

Mystery Egg

Faith wrote: »

Thanks confusticated, that's really helpful! I have a bag of GF flour in my cupboard that I was wondering about using up, and a friend who tries to avoid gluten coming to stay soon, so I was thinking of trying to make southern-style biscuits with the flour. They're like savoury scones, and need very little mixing or they get tough. Seems like they'd just be crumbly and would fall apart potentially, and I'm not willing to go to the effort of buying xanthan gum when she's not coeliac .

I don't know about where you are based right now Faith but you can buy xantham gum for about £2 in the supermarket in the UK. It's a handy thing to have in the cupboard if you've got gluten-avoiders in your life.