Learning Along the Way - How to Cook Gluten Free

I mentioned in a few blog posts about going gluten free to help with my acid reflux. I have eaten mostly gluten free for the past 8 weeks and I have seen a tremendous difference. It took about 4-5 weeks to notice the improvement. In the beginning I purchased many of my gluten free products through the grocery store or my friend that has started a side business producing gluten free mixes. Now that I know that gluten free will be a way of life for me, I now get to go through the process of trial and error with baking and cooking on my own. The one item I really miss is flour tortillas. So this morning I turned my kitchen into a testing site and went to work. The first recipe I wanted to try the main ingredients were egg whites and coconut flour. This was actually a Paleo recipe but I thought it looked interesting. 

Well, it was a total failure. The finished product looked like pancakes but tasted nothing like a pancake or tortilla. So I moved on to the next recipe. I even purchased a tortilla press to help with the process.

The second recipe involved potato and tapicoa starch, sorghum flour, and brown rice flour. I had white rice flour and replaced that for the brown rice flour. These were not a complete failure but did not turn into a tortilla. Again it had the consistency of a pancake or possibly flat bread. Instead of throwing them all out I ate one as a sandwich for lunch and it was really bad. I froze the remainder of them and will pull them out one at a time to try them as quick pizza crusts.  One mistake that I made was reading the original recipe wrong. The beginning of the recipe was evidently giving me another recipe to create the all purpose gluten free flour out of the four ingredients above. So after I mixed this up I thought it was for the tortilla and had already mixed in the warm water. This meant refiguring some of the other ingredients like salt, baking powder, and xanthum gum. If anyone out there has a really good tortilla recipe I would surely appreciate it. 

I will continue on my adventure of trying to find the perfect gluten free tortilla. I really miss my cheese quesadillas. The brown rice tortillas I buy at the store just aren't cutting it for that. 

I should also mention that yesterday I went to the library and check out some gluten free baking books and will start testing those out as well for mainly cookies.