by Paul Graham
It’s not the first ingredient one would think of adding to gluten-free dough, but it turns out that psyllium is a gift to GF bakers. (Not quite as awesome a gift as the God Enzyme in beer, but still revolutionary.) According to the ATK, psyllium readily bonds to the proteins in GF flour blends, allowing the dough to create sturdier protein chains. Thus the dough can trap the carbon dioxide produced by yeast, providing lift, structure, and a chew reminiscent of the experience of eating real bread. Outside of tapioca starch, which also gets naturally chewy when it gelatinizes, psyllium is, for those eaters who can handle it—your colon will thank you later!—possibly as close to gluten-free gluten as we’re going to find. Xanthan gum, for years the standby in GF bread-making, lags far behind.
The first loaf of bread I made from HCIBGF was the basic white sandwich bread. Even with the benefits of psyllium, the process was vastly different from making the real thing. I never experienced the relaxing, rhythmical kneading that led M. F. K. Fisher to liken baking bread to practicing yoga. Not once. I often ended up cursing. Sometimes I threw things—usually fingerfuls of tapioca starch. I wanted to dump the ATK during every one of the six minutes when the lump of batter thunked around in the KitchenAid bowl like a shoe in a dryer, launching crumbs onto the floor for the dog (could she eat psyllium? did I want to know?). When I was done bashing the hell out of the bread batter—it would be a stretch to call it dough—I was doubtful about the results. It didn’t even go into a baking pan evenly. It stuck to everything, but it especially stuck to my hands.
From that point on, the dough behaved like bread dough was supposed to. An hour later, I peered flinchingly at the pan and saw that it had risen. Substantially. More than any loaf we’d ever made.
After it had been in the oven for about forty-five minutes, the house filled with that incomparable smell of baking bread. It smelled better than any of the bagged mixes or other recipes we’d tried. Could I even remember what the real stuff smelled like? Not really, to be honest, and this realization troubled me. But this smell was similar, warm and yeasty and comforting. The loaf, after it had cooled, yielded easily to the slicing knife, and there were—I could hardly believe it—air pockets, and some spring. When we tasted a slice, unadorned so as to be objective, there was no funky aftertaste at all.
Suddenly the whole process seemed worth it. After nearly eighteen months, we were baking loaves in our house once again.
Okay, Test Kitchen, that wasn’t even close to fun. Or convenient. Or economical. But you win.
We rationed the bread over the week. When we ran out, I made more.
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An artisan flaxseed loaf drew my attention next, but I took one look at the recipe, which spanned two pages and featured photographs to help the novice along, and cried foul. What kind of madness was this? Bread didn’t require ten ingredients, parchment paper, and a skillet. Now the scientists at the Test Kitchen were going too far.
As usual, Bec figured out that my fury meant I wanted the loaf, but I didn’t want to suffer the disappointment and wasted time if it totally tanked.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll make it.”
I walked the dog and returned to find that the process was not as hard as it looked. What had appeared to be a call for weird equipment turned out to be the ATK’s clever substitution for the baking stone used for free-form, bakery-style loaves: you put the dough in an ovenproof skillet lined with parchment paper and slid that into the oven on top of the baking stone, because the loaf would collapse and get deformed with too much handling (it doesn’t tolerate any handling at all).
When Bec pulled this bread out of the oven ninety—ninety!—minutes later, I immediately liked the looks of it: round, domed, the crust browned and ridged where she had slashed it with a knife before leaving it to rise. It resembled the Artisan breads she used to make; and it inspired the same feelings. The heft, the shape, and the smell made me want to tear pieces off right away, the way I used to.
We took a walk together so I couldn’t attack it. The evening was beautiful, the sky moody and gray in some places, and gilt in others where the sunlight broke through after the recent rainstorms. A loamy, fertile smell floated up from the soaked ground. The garden was growing well in our raised beds, and soon the real fun would begin. Could it be that everything was coming together, finally?
Later that night we cut ourselves each a slice. The texture was chewy from the flaxseed and slightly sweet from the almond flour Bec had substituted for the oat flour. It was a hearty loaf with the spirit of whole wheat.
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“I think it’s great.”
“So do I.”
And just like that, by going ahead in time, not back, by using baking science and a weird assembly of ingredients that nobody would have considered dropping into a bread dough recipe twenty years ago, we had bread—not one type, but two. We felt wealthy, and our kitchen seemed to be full.
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When I finally spoke to Jack Bishop about HCIBGF and how the book came to be written, he told me the ATK’s goal was not to frustrate the home cook (and to be fair, many people might not find the bread recipes fussy at all, and most of the others are quite easy). Rather, the ATK wanted recipes for GF breads and other foods that would appeal to everyone, not just those with intolerances. If that’s your aim, then you have to focus on the foods that people come together to share—pizzas, pastas, cakes, breads, and cookies. Basically, anything with gluten. The better privately owned GF bakeries had already figured that out, but among cookbooks this thinking in itself seemed to me a revolutionary starting point. Few available GF cookbooks were taking as their premise that the cook desired to create a GF meal or bake something that would bring everyone at the table pleasure. A goal like that sets the bar very high. You’re asking the available starches to do things they’re not designed to do, which was why bakers were slow to figure out how to do it. According to Bishop, people knew what the ATK was capable of, and they had been asking them to do a book like this for a long time.
“I think there’s something about baked goods that people just have a need for in a deep and emotional way,” Bishop told me. “Tofu, that is not a food that’s likely to have deep emotional connections for you.” And so, for your average American, losing tofu would not amount to any great sacrifice. Indeed, it’s a trade I would readily make. “But chocolate chip cookies, and bread, they do have deep emotional connections.”
When I asked him which foods provide those feelings for him, and so would be the most difficult to surrender, he did not hesitate. “That’s easy. Bread!” At the start of the process of writing HCIBGF, he told me he might have said pasta, but in assembling the book the ATK discovered that there are some good GF pastas available now (and I would agree). “All bread,” he clarified, “but especially baguettes.”
In order to achieve the broad appeal they sought, when the ATK editors taste-tested the results, at least half the tasters had to like the dish. The test group was comprised of both people with gluten and wheat sensitivities and people who could eat anything safely. In Bishop’s memory, it was the most difficult cookbook project the ATK had ever done. They completed it in nine months, an astonishing pace. Doing so required six people testing recipes in the kitchen every day (two of them on gluten-free diets for medical reasons), plus two editors to synthesize the results. The endpoint, compared to where they started, surprised even Bishop, who told me that while he tries never to spit food out in the Test Kitchen because he feels it’s rude, in the early stages of writing this cookbook, the results of the recipes were beyond bad. “They were inedible,” he said. The thought of spectacular failures at the ATK amused me, especially when I recalled how the tone of the Test Kitchen’s cooking shows and magazines is so confident and calm as to make a perfect dish seem like an inevitability, even an anticlimax. Putting a camera in the kitchen for this book might have made for some entertaining food TV.
The most profound insight the ATK un
covered in their nine months of recipe-testing, in my view, is that cooking and baking successfully without wheat and gluten requires counterintuition—or maybe it’s countertraining. In order to make not just edible but truly successful cakes, or biscuits, or muffins, for instance, the cooks had to go against cardinal rules and processes they had been taught and even humbled by their instructors and superiors for not following. These adjustments in approach seemed to be just as important as the discovery of psyllium or nonfat milk powder, or the addition of vinegar to the GF grains in their piecrust. In some cases, the adjustments to process were more important.
For example, GF bread gets more bread-like when you beat the batter on high speed for six minutes, which is something that you would never, ever do with wheat. Even existing GF recipes, like that on the bag of Pamela’s bread mix, only call for three minutes of high-speed mixing. The extra mixing time allows the psyllium to work into the rice and other proteins. Similarly, you don’t walk away from muffin batters made of wheat flour and let them sit for an hour before baking. The result, Bishop pointed out, would be a tough muffin. But allowing low-moisture rice-based flours time to hydrate was an important breakthrough in many of the recipes.
Bishop’s description of the way gluten-free cooking forces a cook to reroute his approach revealed the sources of my own early catastrophes: the fresh raviolis that tore and then turned into gritty balls; the breads that crumbled to dust as soon as they cooled, or went stale in only six hours; the roux that would not brown; the breading that came off; the crêpes that tore like tissue paper. I lacked some key substitutions and additions, yes, but more important than that, my ways of cooking, the practices that had made me a good cook, were on autopilot and foiling me. The old rules didn’t apply anymore.
When I thought back on my rare successes, I saw that they often came at times when I ditched the “right way,” mumbled some expletives, and watched what was happening in the pan or the bowl closely, adjusting as I went. Some things, however, I never would have figured out on my own.
Among the adaptations the Test Kitchen found most difficult were, surprisingly, cookies. “Cookies are really hard [to convert to gluten-free],” Bishop told me. “People think, oh, cookies must be easy because they’re the first things kids learn to make.” The GF food industry’s offerings back this up; bad GF cookies are everywhere. But a good cookie in the sense that we think of as “good”—as the ATK went on to observe, through multiple object lessons—is the result of specific chemical reactions. Cookies have to spread properly, because there’s no mold or form for them, and they rely on gluten to do this. They’re also complicated because they contain little added moisture—a few eggs, some oil or butter, and that’s about it. In a gluten-free environment, the recipe adaptations that start out wet tend to be more forgiving than drier recipes.
Cookies are also more forgiving than bread because of the presence of sugar and butter. The absence of sugar and fat in bread meant that the many loaves in the book were not at all easy for the Test Kitchen to perfect. Psyllium and flax, and even almond flour, can approximate some of the properties of wheat, but they can never imitate it exactly, and an eater tends to notice un-wheatlike qualities more in breads that do not have a high sugar content, like brioche, or eggy mixtures like challah. The ATK found the basic breads turned out more successfully with the addition of eggs, sometimes butter, oil, or all three. These ingredients do work, but I’ve always been bothered by a sense that each addition takes the loaf further away from the simplicity and purity that bread has known for thousands of years. I couldn’t help but wonder, Was this bread I was pulling out of my oven, or something else? Was it closer to a quick bread, or a cake? Did it even matter, as long as I was trembling with anticipation?
Jack Bishop and I didn’t talk about this, but I think I know what his answer would be. The ATK’s modus operandi, for as long as I’ve been following them, has always been the quality of the food on the plate, not a recipe’s ties to its historical roots. Taste, texture, and a pleasurable eating experience trump everything else. They can be frugal when it makes sense (and like all true Yankee institutions seem to enjoy being so), but they’ll break the bank if the test results indicate that expensive ingredients make a difference. They love an easy night in the kitchen, but they’ll set you up for a climb if necessary. They can be unsentimental, even iconoclastic, about the sanctity of a traditional recipe, as, for example, when they deconstructed Julia Child’s boeuf Bourguignon to make it easier to prepare. Though effective, many of their shortcuts and innovations would give members of the culinary old guard—chefs and writers like Escoffier, maybe—fits. Thinking about the results of their philosophy encouraged me to let go of some of my long-held beliefs about purity.
As the old saying goes, discretion is the better part of valor, and the ATK also know when to back down. When I asked Bishop what they couldn’t do without gluten that they wished they could, he noted that respondents have asked for three things: bagels, baguettes, and croissants. Each is a form of bread with its own ties to cultural tradition and eating practices. Each also has a low bullshit tolerance; it demands adherence to traditional processes and ingredients.
Bishop believed that the ATK would tackle bagels in a future book. About baguettes, he was skeptical, like many GF bakers I’ve talked to. And on the subject of croissants, he laughed out loud. There are some things you just can’t do. It’s better to acknowledge that fact from the start and put your energy into the battles you can win.
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After the bread, our reclamations kept piling up: muffins, cake, fresh pasta.
I adjusted to the rigors of the ATK process, which turned out to be good training for the rigors of just about every GF recipe worth cooking that I would encounter over the next few years. Most of the time, I felt as if Christopher Kimball stood in the corner of my kitchen, over by the water cooler, where he watched in that red monogrammed apron (no apron for me; I hadn’t earned it yet), stroking his chin as I looked for shortcuts. Which, by the way, I never found. Ever. I did have to make some substitutions for oat flour on more than one occasion, which annoyed me, but the bread recipes turned out to be surprisingly forgiving on that score. Or, I might have been eating bad bread for so long that everything excited me.
One night, I decided to revisit the scene of an earlier crime. I made crêpes.
It had taken me a long time to forget that disaster, and I returned to it only after things started going my way again. Anyone who cooks seriously at home knows that you have winning streaks and losing streaks, a stretch of days when for some reason scrambling an egg kicks your ass, and then a long period where you’re ambitious, playful, and cannot seem to screw anything up even though you might get a little lax. The ATK’s book had given me back my confidence, and I’d recently been riding a winning streak that began with the most beautiful seared scallops I’d ever made, followed by a perfectly grilled strip steak with a strong chimichurri atop a crispy shredded potato–leek cake. For dessert I decided to bump up a flourless chocolate cake by lacing the batter with cayenne. In deference to cholesterol content, I dialed the evening meal down the next night, making tofu—nope, still no deep emotional triggers there—and by the next, when we had Sarah coming for dinner, I was ready to cook with a little swagger again.
Since switching to the GF diet, I had been wondering something: Would it ever be possible to fool a dinner guest who would readily eat as much gluten as she could hold when she was in the mood for it—the one who had started the yearlong Artisan Bread feed among us—by serving her gluten-free baked goods? Was now the time to try, with GF crêpes? She wouldn’t really be fooled—she knew which house she was coming to—but was it time to test the Test Kitchen’s guiding premise?
I made the decision to try about fifteen minutes before Sarah arrived. There’s a school of kitchen wisdom that says this is never a good idea. Plan your menu three days in advance, and don’t deviate unless you’re unafraid to admit defeat and order
a pizza—which was like an escape pod that would now forever have an OUT OF ORDER sign taped to the door in our kitchen. But I liked a challenge, and would continue to like it well into the future: Just how much rice dressed up as wheat could I serve my guests and have them like it? I was moving from hating the game to trying to beat the game.
Crêpes, as I had well learned, don’t leave a cook much room to hide. Either the recipe works or it chokes. They are delicate, unforgiving of lapses in attention and temperature variations, and they would appear to rely absolutely on gluten to hold together. Nevertheless, I was even up to my old tricks again: I decided to convert the HCIBGF recipe into a savory version. I followed my instincts, turning the sugar way down and guessing about the salt.
The crêpes worked. Or, we worked together, the Test Kitchen and I. Splendidly. Thin but not so delicate that they broke, chewy but not too rubbery. Sarah, Bec, and I ate them on our deck with smoked salmon and cheese and salad, a bottle of rosé—one of our first meals outdoors after a long, hard winter.
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This left the final frontier: pizza.
I had learned well that the road to eating hell is cobbled with awful GF pizza as much as it’s cobbled with GF bread. My experience had told me that most GF pizzas, whether homemade, frozen at the store, or from a restaurant, couldn’t be called a pizza any more than you can call a toaster-oven pizza bagel or a microwaved Pizza Pocket a pizza. Once I ordered a GF pie from the local pizza place when a friend was in town; he wanted the specialty of the house, which is basically a cheese-filled doughnut, a pizza that has been folded over and deep-fried. I tried to avoid bitterness as he ate his and I ate mine, but all I could think was, This is some grim shit right here.
