gluten-free eats

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.

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.

This recipe is adapted from Cookie + Kate's oat waffles, which I've already shared here, but I've been fiddling with it to make something a bit lighter and not so oat-y, and I think I've got it. These waffles are light and fluffy on the inside and often crisp and golden brown on the outside, though your results may vary as mine inevitably do. The waffle iron is a fickle creature.

Ingredients:

2 cups oat flour (200 grams)
1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon cassava flour (56 grams)
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fine salt
1 cup apple juice or almond milk
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons light oil (6 fl oz)
1/4 cup maple syrup
4 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar

( recipe )

Questions? Ask 'em!