[Sca-cooks] Was that gluten-free flour?

[rtanhil]

Was your friend's intolerance for gluten-free flour? If so,
your friend is in good company. It seems more and more
people are gluten intolerant, for a number of very good
medical reasons.

Unfortunately, without gluten, you can't make bread (or at
least bread that we fortunate gluten-eaters would recognize
as such).

Here's why: yeast is a living microorganism. It needs
carbohydrates to survive. It "eats" the carbohydrates in the
flour, or in whatever sugar your recipe calls for, and as
part of the process, "exhales" carbon dioxide. The gluten (a
protein, incidentally) in the flour forms a foam-like
network that traps the carbon dioxide. When you bake the
bread, the network hardens and we get leavened bread.

If you take out the gluten, the yeast will still give off
carbon dioxide, but the framework to trap it is much weaker
without the long strands of gluten to hold it in. The result
would be dense, heavy, and probably very brittle.

On the plus side, your gluten-free flour would probably be
just fine for battering items meant for the fryer. There,
the eggs provide the protein to hold the whole thing
together.

Which gets me thinking. I wonder if you could make very thin
bread-y things out of the gluten-free flour if you upped the
eggs in the recipe. You couldn't make loaves, because they
would be too big to keep the carbon dioxide trapped long
enough for the network to harden. That was awkward. It would
take too long for the heat to set the center before it
collapsed. But maybe for something, say pancake
thickness....

Let me know how it turns out.

Berelinde