My first attempt at a gluten-free pie was a fine success, if I do say so myself. I used the Flaky Pastry recipe from Rebecca Reilly’s Gluten-Free Baking, more or less:
1.5 c flour mix*
3 T sweet rice flour
2 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
9 T cold butter, cut into cubes
1 large egg
1.5 T lemon juice
Make sure food processor is really, actually clean of wheat flour, as opposed to just masquerading as clean. Mix dry ingredients in the food processor, then add butter and process until it’s the size of small peas (which is what you always do with pie crust). Be weirded out by egg in pie crust, but shrug and add egg and lemon juice and pulse until the dough starts to come together.
See that the dough is failing to come together as advertised, and start adding ice water until it can actually be pressed together into a ball. Make two balls, put them in tupperware, and chill in the fridge until it’s pie-making time.
Preheat oven to 400. Sprinkle rice flour on a cutting board. Attempt to roll out the dough. Have it crumble all over the place. Give up and press it into the pie plate with your fingers. Dump in filling — in this case, apple slices mixed with brown sugar, molasses, and cinnamon. (These were the last of the fall apples. Turns out Honeycrisps really do last forever in the fridge! Thanks, Tommy Nicewicz!)
Notice that S, who is more patient than you are, has managed to work the rest of the dough enough that it actually rolls. Yay! Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of it to cover the whole pie. Break his nicely rolled dough into ice-floe-like chunks all over the apples. Bake the pie for 15 minutes on the bottom rack, turn the heat down to 375, then bake for another half hour on the middle rack.
Wheat-eater and non-wheat-eater agreed: it tasted like pie! Or, you know, it tasted like molasses-y apples surrounded by crunchy butter, which is more or less what I want from my pie.
*Yes, I used a commercial flour blend, in this case Beth’s All-Purpose Baking Flour from Gluten-Free Pantry, because that’s what Harvest sold me. Using a mix offends my from-scratch sensibilities, though, so next time I will track down enough damn flours and mysterious powders whose names end in “gum” to make my own.
2 responses so far ↓
1 jadelennox // Feb 8, 2010 at 9:02 am
yAt!
The Harvest has almost all of the special flours and gums. Many of them are available in the bulk bins (which are cheaper, but if you are cooking for someone who is actually celiac or have more sensitive issue than mine you probably want to avoid the bulk bins, because there’s a lot of cross-contamination over there). The rest are available down past the baked goods, where there is some Bob’s stuff and the Ener-G egg replacer and potato starch and such.
A few of the more expensive items are often not available at the Harvest, but I have found them at Pemberton (almond flour, coconut flour, for example). Annoyingly, at Pemberton, they appear to be way past their sell by dates, but I bought them anyway and they seem to work fine. I’m not dead, anyway. Again, those are in the rack of Bob’s stuff. Pemberton doesn’t seem to have anything that’s not Bob’s.
I am finally learning the difference between potato starch and potato flour. As far as I can tell, a lot of places sell potato starch as potato flour and vice versa, but they are different. What I did this time it I went to the Bob’s rack at Pemberton, because Bob’s sells both, and I bought one of each. That way I figure I know they are correctly labeled, and next time I will be able to recognize which one I am buying if I buy it from a different brand. Because a lot of gluten-free recipes call for one or the other.
2 Sam // Feb 8, 2010 at 10:24 am
That’s a good point about the cross-contamination of the bulk aisle. Bloody hell.
I hardly ever cook meat and I’m possibly the world’s least germ-averse cook (if the idea that I might have stuck my finger in to taste something bothers you, um, don’t come to dinner at my house). So thinking of food as a contaminant is totally foreign to me. I need reminders like that.
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