After being diagnosed with Celiac disease, many people can’t help but lament the loss of delicious, moist baked goods in their life. It’s truly heartbreaking for foodies with a penchant for breads.
Nowadays, with increasing awareness of gluten allergies and Celia disease, there are ways to still enjoy tasty, oven-fresh baked goods that are completely gluten-free. One of our favorite gluten-free baked goods to indulge in is biscuits. Sweet or savory, nothing beats a perfectly flakey and fluffy biscuit that won’t send your body into a tailspin of discomfort.
Gluten-free baking can be slightly tricky, so here are a few useful tips for making wonderful gluten-free biscuits.
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Keep Your Ingredients Simple
There’s no need to get complicated with your biscuit ingredients, so go ahead a leave the xanthan and guar gums in the cupboard. Any type of gluten-free flour and starch mixed with baking powder and salt will suffice. For white, fluffy biscuits, fine white or brown rice flour is the good way to go.
When it comes to adding starch, tapioca or potato starch are good bets. Still, if you already have quinoa, millet, or sorghum that you use as flour, and cornstarch or arrowroot powder, feel free to use those. They also work well for tasty biscuits.
Next, you’ll need a liquid and a fat to add to the mix. For non-vegans, milk and butter will provide that level of moistness often unattained in gluten-free baked goods. However, Earth Balance or shortening and soy milk are great alternatives. Make sure both are cold when adding them to the recipe.
Easy with Those Heavy Hands
When it comes time to work the dough for your biscuits, maintain a soft touch. Think the clay scene from Ghost. Not so much any of the fighting scenes from Fight Club. A soft touch as you work kneed it will result in lighter, flakier biscuits. Perfectly smooth dough isn’t super important. In fact, leaving a few chunks of fat in the dough adds to the flakiness of the end product, so keep a light hand.
A Little More Liquid Won’t Hurt
Thing the about making biscuits is you don’t have to have perfect measurements of your ingredients. A little extra here and there won’t do any real damage. This is especially true when adding the liquid to your mixture. Sometimes, because of humidity and other factors, you need a little bit more liquid to dough that’s looking a bit too dry. Just make sure to add gradually so you don’t end up with soppy dough.
Roll Out the Dough
Not a fan of dishes? Just pat out the dough instead of flattening it out with a rolling pin. Then just take pieces and drop them onto the cookie sheet. Easy peasy!
With these handy tips, baking gluten-free biscuits is simple. Go ahead and test them out on this recipe from Your Homebased Mom or this recipe from Nosh On. Just make sure to go into the baking process ready and unafraid. Harness the power of Julia Child, if need be. Mistakes sometimes happen, but there’s no need to fret about it. With practice come tasty biscuits!
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