Welcome to Gluttony Sans Gluten! I’m a lifelong cook and baker, and I’ve been gluten free since I found out I have Celiac disease in 2021. Since then, I’ve been working towards a better understanding of gluten free cooking and baking so that I can enjoy all the foods that I did before my diagnosis.
My Kitchen Philosophy
Growing up, I was a picky eater. I think this was partially because I was generally not very interested in food and eating (unless it contained copious amounts of sugar) and partly because I found certain food textures intolerably gross. As an adult, my palette has expanded quite a bit, but I’ve remained cognizant of how personal food preferences can be.
On this blog, you’ll find recipes that I developed, and they reflect my personal needs and tastes. I write the recipes that I think produce the most delicious result, but that is subjective! I like to use a lot of cooking fat because my body craves fats. I know that for some people a piece of toast drenched in butter is kind of gross, but to me, it’s delicious. Use your judgement; if you look at a recipe and think “that is way too much oil” then maybe give it a go with less if it looks delicious other than that. You know your body best, trust yourself.
Guiding rules:
- Taste as you go when cooking
- If it can be made easy, it should be
Tasting my food as I made it was a revelation. When you are salting a dish, you can taste the difference the salt makes as you add it. Where possible, I recommend tasting as you go.
While difficult recipes can be satisfying to make, I do not like recipes that are fiddly for the sake of it. If I’m adding a step that feels challenging or unnecessary to a recipe, I will explain why I’m doing so. If you see a shortcut that I don’t know about, take it! While I enjoy the journey (baking and cooking), I’m doing it for the destination (eating the food).
Why do I use weights?
I could say here that it’s more accurate and you get more consistent results, which is true, but the truth of the matter is that I do it because it creates fewer dishes. I don’t like washing out a measuring cup if I can help it, even if I can just stick it in the dishwasher. I cannot understate the euphoria of just dirtying a single bowl and spoon (and maybe one to two measuring spoons) as opposed to every single measuring cup I have. The added bonus of increased recipe replicability is a welcome bonus, especially since gluten free baking can be so much more finicky than glutinous baking.
Give it a try, scales are cheap.
Why don’t I use flour blends?
This one is pretty simple. Gluten free flour blends can be great for some types of baking and cooking and terrible for others. Additionally, there is no way to accurately predict the result you’ll get from a recipe with different flour blends. There is no “just use any blend” foolproof recipe because each blend is made with different flours with different absorbencies and different amounts of gluten mimicking agents (eg. xanthan gum, psyllium husk, other more esoteric ingredients). Additionally, no recipe author wants to exhaustively test every common flour blend and report their results before publishing a recipe, I certainly don’t. That would suck.
The most elegant solution to this that I’ve come to is to format all of my recipes in grams of each type of flour. If I’ve tried a flour blend, I’ll note it in the recipe as well.
Who Am I and What’s My Deal
My name is Sal, I’m in my early 30s living on the west coast of the United States. I’ve lived in the US my entire life, so information on here skews heavily toward the US. I’m a scientist, artist, writer, reader, and doer of things. I’m also genderfluid (or nonbinary, for expedience).
