gluten-free eats

Nestlé Toll House Allergen Free Semi-Sweet Morsels: I wasn't expecting much from these. Straight out of the bag, the cold chips are brittle and leave a bit of a greasy mouthfeel behind, but, undeterred, and having spent almost seven dollars on them, I threw them into some chocolate chip cookies and they were surprisingly good! Nice chocolate flavor, no grease or wax detected in the mouth, and a pleasingly smooth texture once they've been warmed up that remains even after they cool. I'll buy them again since my favorite chocolate chips (from Guittard) are harder to find in stores. I found these in the regular baking aisle of my Kroger rather than in the "natural" section where I do most of my GF shopping.

These come in a 10 oz bag rather than the standard 12 oz. So heads up if you're used to just opening a bag and dumping it in without measuring. They also come in dark chocolate in an even smaller—9 oz—bag! I'll try those next in these S'mores cookies from Minimalist Baker, which definitely need a darker chocolate to balance the sweetness of the marshmallow.

Organic. Labeled gluten free, but not certified GF. Free from peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, milk, wheat, soy, fish, and shellfish.

Current Ingredients: organic cane sugar, organic chocolate, organic cocoa butter.

Miyoko's European Style Plant Milk Butter, Salted: I'm really happy with this! It spreads nicely straight out of the refrigerator, melts easily on toasted bread, and tasted appropriate on the fake bagel I put it on, with no coconut flavor. It does, however, have a slightly funky smell which is particularly noticeable if you melt a significant amount for cooking or baking. This is because it's cultured, like a cheese. I can't say I like the smell, but I do like the results as it successfully replicates some of the tanginess of dairy.

This can be used as a 1:1 replacement for dairy butter in baking, and so I gave that a spin as well, with these chewy chocolate chip cookies from My Gluten-Free Kitchen. They were indeed chewy and baked up nicely, though they didn't brown as much as I expected. (I used Bob's 1-to-1 Baking Flour, and, as the recipes warns, it was good but not great. Kind of gritty, even with a 24 hour chillin' in the fridge. But the cookies were still pretty damned good so I made them again with America's Test Kitchen flour blend (yes it contains milk powder my life is complicated) and that solved the grittiness problem, but I think my fiddling with the butter/cream cheese ratio in order to use up all the fake cream cheese caused them to spread more than the first batch. They were still excellent, but thinner and more crispy. I will continue to experiment with this as I am nothing but dedicated to finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie.)

Back to Miyoko's butter, I also used it in some vegan chocolate cream cheese frosting, but I didn't let it warm up enough on the counter so it was kind of in shards in there rather than fully blended into the mix. My bad. The next time I made regular vegan cream cheese frosting and I thought I let the butter warm up more, but I had the same problem. So I just let the mixer run and eventually everything became fluffy and smooth, and it worked out great. The butter itself is kind of an uneasy lard color, but not so much that it makes a white frosting look off. I'm going to try it in a buttercream next.

This product is very easy to find in my area and also comes in unsalted. I buy it at my local Kroger analogue, but I've also seen it at Target and Trader Joe's, and of course all the fancy grocery stores carry it. It's one of those slabs of butter, a wide, flat rectangle, and must be refrigerated. When I ate dairy butter I always kept the stick I was using on the counter so this is something new for me. I'm also a bit wary of how long this plant butter will last before it...goes bad? Anyone have intelligence on this? I know it has an expiration date on it but fake dairy products always last longer than those numbers do.

I'll definitely keep buying this, and I'm excited to finally try some of those recipes I've been hoarding that call for butter, vegan or otherwise. Dinner rolls! Scones!! PIE CRUST????

Current Ingredients: Organic Coconut Oil, Organic Cultured Cashew Milk (Filtered Water, Organic Cashews, Cultures), Filtered Water, Organic Sunflower Oil, Organic Sunflower Lecithin, Sea Salt.

Simple Truth Dairy Free Sweet Caramel Frozen Dessert Bars: These bars are a Kroger house brand and delicious. The caramel ice cream is smooth and sweet and creamy and has a hint of coconut to it that melds really well with the caramel, which tastes absolutely real and not at all like "caramel flavor." There's a little caramel swirl in the ice cream that you can't really appreciate until the chocolate shell snaps off in huge sheets, which, let's be real, it will. Though the shell is made of actual chocolate, it can be a bit greasy if you get too much of it in your mouth at once, but it's thin enough to bite into easily and the toffee bits embedded in it are crunchy and good. I'd buy these again.

Current Ingredients: Caramel Frozen Dessert: Water, Sugar, Coconut Oil, Soluble Maize Fiber, Coconut Cream (Coconut Extract, Water), Pea Protein, Inulin, Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids (Emulsifier), Stabilizers (Locust Bean Gum, Guar Gum), Natural Flavors, Caramelized Sugar Syrup, Beta Carotene (Color), Caramel Flavored Sauce: Sugar, Glucose Fructose Syrup, Water, Caramelized Sugar, Salt, Pectin (Gelling Agent), Sodium Citrate (Acidity Regulator), Natural Flavor, Sweet Chocolate and Vegetable Fat Coating: Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Cocoa Mass, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Lecithin (Emulsifier), Natural Vanilla Flavoring, Caramelized Sugar Pieces: Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Invert Sugar, Sodium Bicarbonate.

Snyder's GF pretzels come in several shapes. I've tried both the mini pretzels and the pretzel sticks, but I prefer the sticks for structural and texture reasons. Both taste exactly as you'd expect from a bagged pretzel, right down to the slightly fishy aftertaste commercial pretzels sometimes have. I don't remember if the intensely starchy mouthfeel is also authentic to wheat-based pretzels, but they have that too.

If you want a crunchy, salty pretzel you can probably find in your nearest natural food store, these will do, and an opened bag stays fresh for weeks, so you don't have to snarf them all down in a matter of days unless you want to.

Current Ingredients: corn starch, potato starch, tapioca starch, palm oil, sodium carboxymethylcellulose, dextrose, salt, sunflower lecithin, baking powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, corn starch, monocalcium phosphate), yeast, citric acid, soda.

I made Snixy Kitchen's Focaccia last week and it turned out really great. It looked just like the pictures and had a crispy outside (from basically being fried in oil) and a chewy (yet fluffy!) inside that's the closest I've come to real bread in a long time.

It uses yeast and psyllium seed husks instead of gums, but I substituted psyllium seed powder (by weight, 5 grams) because that's what I had and it seemed to work out fine, and, as a bonus, the dough came together near instantly instead of having to wait for the husks to suck up all that water. Warning: This bread does take about six hours to make, but four hours of that is sitting around time. It has to rise twice.

Before I put it in the oven, I sprinkled the top with kosher salt, garlic powder, and dried oregano, and gave it just a light drizzle of good olive oil since it was already drowning in it. Also it's salty, which I found delicious, but if you're averse you may want to reduce the amount of salt inside.

Next time I make this I think I'll put a parchment sling under it to get it out of the pan easier, and since I used a glass pan, it got pretty crispy on the edges so I might cut down on the initial 425°F cooking time so it's not quite as crispy.

We ate this with pasta and red sauce, and then I froze half of it for another meal. When we had split pea soup this week, I took out the bread to defrost on the counter, then wrapped it in aluminum foil and stuck it in the toaster oven at 300°F for twenty minutes and it was almost like new.