simont | (no subject)

Well, things aren't as bad as they seemed.

Pizza Express have turned out to be astonishingly clued up about gluten-free diets. (I hadn't expected a pizza-and-pasta shop to need to know about it at all: I'd assumed that coeliacs wouldn't be so silly as to set foot in the place. I only gave it a try because Owen googled up a blog entry by another coeliac who'd tried it and had a good experience.) They don't actually stock GF pizza bases, but they're quite happy to use one if I bring it along, and they were able to look over the starters menu with me and tell me what I could eat. (And in particular they left off one of the things that looked from the description as if it could reasonably have been safe, which somehow gives me confidence that they're not just guessing.) They even have a GF dessert on the menu – lemon polenta cake – which is really rather nice.

This was also an interesting experiment because it narrowed down the cause of my home-made pizzas lacking cohesion. When I make pizza from a base and some toppings, they never seem to stick together properly, and the toppings slide off all the time when I'm eating the result. It wasn't clear to me whether this was the fault of the base or of my preparation. I can now confidently state that it's the latter, since Pizza Express managed to make toppings stick properly to the same base that I failed to last week. I wonder how it's done.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So I went to Monday geek pizza after all yesterday, and will probably continue going back. The only snag is that the GF pizza bases I'm currently buying from Sainsburys are rather small; as a matter of moderate urgency I need to find some bigger ones.

Could you make your own? I certainly have done before and it is quite easy. I'm fairly sure there exists a GF flour replacement otherwise how could Sains. make them.

Yes, there are certainly GF flour substitutes, so in principle I suppose I could do that. But the nice thing about buying them is that they keep indefinitely, so I don't need to faff about preparing a base the day before I plan to be in a pizza restaurant.

Also it's interesting that you say it's easy, because my mother spent quite a lot of my childhood trying to find a good pizza dough recipe, and although she eventually came up with something that the rest of the family was happy to eat, it was never quite to my taste. So I was left with the feeling that making pizza bases was more subtle an art than it looked. I'd ask for your recipe, but it'd probably need extensive modification to work with GF flour anyway.

I suppose there are three possible conclusions we can draw

a) I can cook far better than your mother.
b) I have a lower expectation for Pizza bases.
c) I, by accident, found an ideal Pizza recipe.

I doubt a) or c) are likely hence we are left with b). One thing that might suggest the bases aren't too bad is that I make them with my automated bread maker (rather I make the dough and then roll it out myself) so it is more sorft and bread-like than one that one might make by hand.

WRT the keeping problem, they can quite easily be wrapped in cling=film and frozen. Then the problem reduces to remembering to take it out of the freezer in the morning.

Rich, why don't you try getting some gluten-free flour (+ whatever else is needed to replace normal flour) and seeing what happens to the recipe? It'd be an interesting experiment.

True, the other possibility is to create not-quite-pizza-bases. For example we often use Naan breads or french-sticks as bases which work nicely. Perhaps there exists some GF product which could be co-opted into being a base.

The problem with the GF flours is that they're not really suited for breads and doughs which require a period of time for the yeast to work. The reason for this is that its the gluten in the wheat which helps provide a structure for the bubbles of carbon dioxide which the yeast produces.

There are ways of providing this without using gluten - for example xanithum gum - but none of them really work as well as gluten when it comes down to it.

You also have to be careful in your choice of GF flour; for example if you get one which contains rice flour you'll find that the food will end up with a slightly gritty feel in the mouth when its eaten. Its unfortunate that the best general purpose gluten free flour - made by Dove's Farm (http://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/) - contains rice flour. On looking for that site, I've just found that Dove's Farm have increased their range of gluten free flours (http://www.dovesfarm-glutenfree.co.uk/gluten-free-flours.htm) and now have one designed for baking which involves yeast - it contains "natural gums" (I'm guessing xanithum gum here) to provide the structure for the dough to rise. It still contains rice flour though.