Gluten-Free Baking Classics – The Heirloom Collection

90 New Recipes and Conversion Know-How

Gluten-Free Baking Classics—The Heirloom Collection contains 90 timeless and culturally diverse favorites. It will help bakers to round out their repertoire of homestyle baked goods. While these might not be the recipes you typically look for when you first go on a gluten-free diet, they’re the ones that eventually make their way onto many of our wish lists. And they’re all designed to work each and every time you make them.

Recipes include: Cinnamon Roll Scones, Cherry Almond Muffins, Date Nut Bread, six different Bundt Cakes, Orange Chiffon Cake, Pineapple Upside Down Cake, Whoopee Pies, Thumbprints, Madeleines, Lemon Tea Cookies, Moravian Cookies, Yeast Doughnuts, Apple Turnovers, Rugelach and Kifli, Pigs in Blankets, Pierogies, Asian Dumplings, Brioche Hamburger Buns, Rustic Buttermilk Rye Bread, Panettone, and 12 other no-fail breads.

But there is more.

The key to this new book is that it teaches about gluten-free baking and converting recipes in a very deliberate way. In fact, the instructional component was designed to encourage bakers to turn to it when trying to make something outside their repertoire. It offers up a buffet of insight and techniques aimed at making sure that readers learn what they need to do to successfully convert a recipe by themselves, avoid missteps, and trouble-shoot mistakes. Tips and explanations are also woven throughout the recipes.

Early Reviews

“Annalise Roberts, in her new Gluten-Free Basics: The Heirloom Collection, has ratcheted the whole category up another notch. In this thoughtful, well-tested volume she not only provides 90 superb recipes for nearly every type of baked product, but also explains the reasons and rationale behind her unique flour blends and other ingredient choices and substitutions. This book takes the guess work out of gluten-free baking with products just as satisfying as the wheat-based classics upon with they are based. This is a book you will happily use!”
—Peter Reinhart, author, The Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Baking

“Finally a well organized, user friendly, go-to cookbook for gluten-free baking. Annalise Roberts has put her considerable experience to the test here and has come up with a winner. The recipes are creative and delectable. The voice is authoritative, but encouraging. Thank you Annalise for your fine contribution to the genre.”
—Marie Simmons, award winning cookbook author, mariesimmons.com

“In this mouthwatering book, Annalise takes beloved classics and transforms them into gluten-free masterpieces for today’s kitchens. Her first chapters on the hows and whys of GF baking are inspiring and informative beyond anything I’ve seen elsewhere. Brava, Annalise!
—Rick Rodgers, author of KAFFEEHAUS and many other cookbooks

An Excerpt From Chapter 4:  How To Convert a Recipe

     If you were to enroll in an accredited cooking school in order to learn how to bake with wheat, you would be taught very exact, time-tested methods for making pastry, breads, cakes, and cookies. Ingredients would be uniform; standards for what constitutes a good rise, a perfect crust, or a sought-after texture would be explained in detail. You would learn exactly what a chocolate fudge cake batter should look like before you pour it into the pan, and exactly how to handle the dough for your whole grain sandwich bread. Your training would provide a solid foundation for more learning and creativity for years to come.

     If you choose to learn by reading the cookbooks of renowned bakers, the ingredients, techniques, and lessons would be similar within categories across a wide array of recipes. All purpose flour in one cookbook is the same as all purpose flour in another, and once you understood how it behaves, you would be better able to tweak and create your own recipes.

     But if you were newly diagnosed with celiac or non-celiac gluten intolerance, you might go to a local bookstore or an online bookseller and peruse the culinary landscape for baking lore. You would probably also scan the hundreds of gluten-free websites and blogs on the internet. And what would you find? An intellectual free-for-all. To your great dismay you would discover literally dozens of cookbook writers, all giving different instructions, using different flour mixes (or no flour mix at all), and having different opinions about what makes the best gluten-free baked goods. The result? If you were to trust fate and randomly select one of the thousands of recipes available in cookbooks or online, and then take the time to buy the ingredients and make it, the chances are good, not only that you would be able to tell it was gluten-free, but that it wouldn’t be as good as you wanted it to be.

     And therein lies the challenge: how do you start to make sense of it all and, ultimately, be able to convert your own recipe? You need two things: a flour mix that you know well, and a good recipe.

The print book and ebook are back in production (2/20/15).

The corrected version of the print book is now back in production. The copies that shipped out before the end of  February “only” have small, inconsequential typos and text placement spacing issues that had been fixed–  but the wrong file got sent to the printer. I’m very sorry that this happened. These are, for the most part, tiny things. But I don’t want them in the book none the less. For a person who studies the character of the air pockets in her bread (like me), one text correction is one too many. The ingredients and amounts and steps in the recipes are fine- except for these three things things and a few inconsequential typos:

The most important text issues in the recipes are these:

• Fried Yeast Doughnuts – 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum (it is in the nutmeg line!)
• Dumplings for Soup and Stews – Makes 12 round dumplings (not 30). But it is correctly listed as 12 in the recipe.
• Asian Dumpling Dough for Pot Stickers and Gyoza – Makes 14-16 dumplings (not 12). But it is correctly listed as 14-16 in the recipe.

The format for the ebook has also been changed from fixed to flowable. Even though this alters the appearance of each recipe (footnotes are not right next to ingredients or instructions in the side bar), it allows ebook users to better make use of their devices.