The Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Baking

The information contained in this book is based on the experience and research of the authors. It is not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician or other health-care provider. Any attempt to diagnose and treat an illness should be done under the direction of a health-care professional. The publisher and authors are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting from the use of any of the suggestions, preparations, or procedures discussed in this book.

Copyright © 2012 by Peter Reinhart and Denene Wallace
Photographs copyright © 2012 by Leo Gong
Foreword copyright © 2012 by Dr. Tom Schneider

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

eISBN: 978-1-60774-117-6

Food styling by Karen Shinto
Prop styling by Christine Wolheim

v3.1

When I speak to groups, I begin by telling them that at least one person in the room has experienced heart disease, kidney failure, morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiac bypass surgery, multiple vascular stents, ridiculously high cholesterol, stress-induced and explosively high blood pressure, gluten sensitivity, and cancer. I don’t mean that people in the group have collectively experienced these conditions, rather that there is one individual present who has survived them all. They find it hard to believe, then I explain that it’s my own health record—despite the fact that they’d never guess it since I appear to be a fit and vibrant man in his late sixties. I recount how many of my medical woes began during my fighter pilot days in Vietnam, where I experienced multiple exposures to Agent Orange. After the war, I aggressively pursued two contrapuntal paths: intensive medical study—from family practice to a specialty in surgery and another in bariatrics, plus certifications such as ABBM, FACS, and ASBP—and a self-destructive lifestyle. Ultimately, after cheating death numerous times, I began focusing on my own wellness and applied what I’d learned in my medical studies to my life.

When I met Denene Wallace, a fellow survivor of nearly fatal diabetes who had regained her health by applying a new, nutrition-based angle to her treatment, I felt like I’d met a kindred spirit. I happily consumed the many breads, cookies, and other treats she baked for me, and incorporated her dietetic approach in my own meals—which led to deeper levels of healing in my own conditions. Celiac disease, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease won’t just go away; they must be managed day by day through constant self-discipline and support. That’s why I am so excited that Denene joined with Peter Reinhart to share these recipes so anyone struggling with these issues can use them to build wellness.

Denene’s story, which you’ll read shortly, is a compelling testament to the power of being an active participant in your health management; it underpins many of the following key points on gluten intolerance, diabetes, and obesity that form the foundation of my practice.

Gluten intolerance, whether due to celiac genetic disorders or caused by other factors, often progresses from mildly annoying conditions such as colds and aches at first into a full-fledged
hypersensitivity disease that requires daily vigilance. It becomes a life or death survival battle. Many symptoms of disease, such as chronic headaches, insomnia, skin rashes, and fatigue, can often be traced to gluten sensitivity even without the presence of genetic celiac disease. Eliminating or significantly reducing gluten can often alleviate these symptoms and address the condition before it becomes a full-blown disease or does further harm.

Type 2 diabetes is often an outcome of obesity, which in turn perpetuates weight problems. Obesity affects a huge proportion of the American population, and is probably the single greatest health challenge of our time. Excess weight becomes disease when the body can no longer manage the condition on its own and stops functioning as it should.

Diseases like diabetes and celiac do not go away; they must be managed. Type 2 diabetes can often be managed without insulin or medication (in conjunction with medical supervision) by adjusting the diet to eliminate excessive carbohydrates. Insulin is produced naturally in the pancreas, and its role in our body is to convert carbohydrates (and proteins, to a lesser extent) into stored fat cells, creating a reserve of emergency energy for our body. However, when we overload the pancreas and it can’t keep producing insulin to deal with excessive carbs in our system, overeating morphs into the diseases of obesity and diabetes. Simple solution: get rid of the carbs to stem insulin overproduction.

The best way to reduce carbs is to stop eating the foods that contain them—especially those without fiber. On the flipside, eating foods that are high in dietary fiber is healthful in many ways, especially because they can somewhat balance out the carb load, moving carbs through the digestive system quickly and shielding the body from insulin production overload. Finally, replace high carb foods with alternatives that are high in protein. Denene and Peter have done just that, by exchanging carbohydrate- and starch-loaded flours for nut and seed flours with high amounts of protein and healthy fats.

Attaining health and wellness involves both complex and straightforward steps, but it is always simpler to deal with conditions before they become full-blown diseases. The recipes in this book provide an easy way to replace disease-causing foods with those that promote health and can even reverse the effects of disease. They will also bring you joy and well-being, which is an important part of my own formula for healing. My core belief is that while celiac, diabetes, and obesity are all diseases, the solution is not a pill. To manage or reverse them requires lifestyle changes; you have to take charge of your own body and make a commitment to a lifelong wellness path. This book is a new tool—I advise you whole heartedly to use it; it will change your life, I promise.

Dr. Tom Schneider, MD, FACS, ABBM—Healthspan Institute, Spring, 2012

I am not sensitive to gluten, as my previous books attest. However, neither am I immune to the dietary challenges brought about by the passionate consumption of products made with wheat, as anyone who has seen me also knows. There was a time when I was lean and mean, and then I opened a bakery and began a love affair with bread products of all types. Back in 1971, when I was twenty-one, I participated in a communally operated vegetarian restaurant in Boston in which no white flour, white sugar, or white rice was permitted to cross the threshold. I read everything I could find on nutrition and various popular food philosophies of the time, such as macrobiotics, raw foods and sprouts, wheat grass therapy, food combining, and juicing. I even met Jack LaLanne, one of my personal fitness heroes. For three years I ate only organically grown food and unrefined whole grains, and all of my childhood allergies and food sensitivities seemed to fade away. At five feet six inches, I weighed a lithe 136 pounds and felt great. At the end of those three years we sold the restaurant and everyone moved on, and in the next phase of my journey, I once again became an omnivore.

Even as my weight gradually increased, I maintained excellent health, which I attributed to those three dynamic years of immersion in a healthful lifestyle. By the time my wife, Susan, and I opened our own restaurant and bakery in 1986, I weighed 155 pounds and had become stocky. When we sold the business seven years later, I was up to 165 pounds and would have been heavier were it not for the daily, physically intense work of baking thousands of loaves of bread, which helped me burn off a lot of calories.

As soon as I stepped out of daily production and transitioned into teaching at culinary schools and writing books, I started gaining more weight—and quickly. The accumulated effects of tasting glorious white-flour breads of all types, along with access to the handiwork of fabulous chefs and restaurants to which I lost all ability to say no, caused my weight to balloon to over 200 pounds. Searching for the perfect pizza as I researched my book
American Pie
didn’t help either, but I sure was having fun! Fortunately, I never stopped working out, so even though I was, to put it bluntly, fat, it was firm fat, marbled with muscle. Nonetheless,
it was cause for concern, especially that most pernicious of fats: belly fat. So recently, with Susan’s encouragement, I decided it was time to get serious about losing weight.

I had already met Denene Wallace a few years earlier at a private tasting of some of her gluten-free products and was impressed with how good they were. Gluten sensitivity is a subject I had been tracking since 1991, shortly after my first book,
Brother Juniper’s Bread Book
, came out. Around that time, Loree Starr Brown, who had been a regular customer at Brother Juniper’s Bakery, came in one day with a box of homemade breads and muffins based on the recipes in my book, but all made with rice flour instead of wheat flour. They were delicious. Loree proceeded to educate me about celiac disease, a medical condition that nearly killed her before it was finally diagnosed and treated by removing all traces of gluten from her diet.

At that time, it seemed that only a small number of people had issues with gluten, so there weren’t many gluten-free products on the market. But like most people who stop eating bread, Loree missed it greatly, so she developed her own recipes—and then taught me the techniques she’d developed, using rice flour, tapioca flour (aka cassava flour), potato starch, xanthan gum, and egg replacers to make breads that evoked the flavors of those I made at Brother Juniper’s Bakery. A few years later, Loree and I collaborated on a few gluten-free recipes that appeared in the revised
Joy of Cooking
(1998 edition), for which I served as the editor of the bread chapter. Soon I began creating my own variations of gluten-free products, employing my own trick of using flour made from sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds to improve the flavor. One of my recipes is now used as the gluten-free crust for a major frozen food company.

The products I made were quite good—perhaps even excellent. But Denene Wallace’s products were a revelation. And as every chef and gourmand knows, healthful food is really only as good as it tastes. People typically won’t eat food just because it’s good for them; they have to enjoy it. I believe that most of us follow what I call the “flavor rule,” which, simply stated, is that flavor rules! Denene clearly adhered to this prime directive, creating baked goods of uncommon tastiness that also happened to be gluten-free, sugar-free, and low in carbohydrates, thus meeting all her dietary needs.

When the opportunity came for me to write a book about gluten-free baking—one that wouldn’t simply repeat what already exists in other books but would add new options for home bakers—I decided I couldn’t do it without Denene as my coauthor. So we brought together our collective knowledge and the fruits of our experimentation to present more than eighty recipes unlike any that exist in other books and that, in our opinion, are not just
safe for those who must avoid gluten, sugar, and foods with a high glycemic index, but also are so delicious that even those who don’t have such dietary restrictions will embrace them. After all, flavor rules!

To take my commitment one step further, I had a personal objective when working on this book. Unlike the process of creating my previous books, in which I gained weight during the recipe testing, this time I wanted to lose weight—at least 25 pounds and hopefully more, by the time it came out. I’ll report on that later, in the Epilogue.

I’ve always felt that I was an artist at heart, even in childhood. My artistic inclinations were evident in my love for drawing and my seemingly constant desire to rearrange and redecorate my bedroom. These talents eventually led to a very successful career in interior design, first in Louisiana, then in Georgia. In the early 1990s, I established my own interior design studio, The Design Source, in a suburb of Atlanta. For fifteen years, I thoroughly enjoyed building my business by creating beautiful living environments for my clients.

Little did I know that my creativity and artistic skills would eventually serve me well in an entirely different realm: dealing with an unexpected and life-changing health issue. First, my husband, Greg, and I discovered that we were both gluten sensitive in 2003. Then, in the summer of 2006, my doctor told me that I had type 2 diabetes and would require insulin shots for the rest of my life. The news was devastating. I’d never had a weight problem and always thought of myself as quite healthy. I began a regimen of five insulin shots a day and also started educating myself about diabetes. My research led me to believe that changing my diet and exercise habits might allow me to at least reduce the number of insulin shots, and possibly eliminate the need for them entirely.

As I educated myself on blood sugar issues, I began to eliminate various foods from my diet. Removing products containing sugar was relatively easy because I had never been a big eater of sweets or desserts. The challenge was drastically reducing my intake of carbohydrates, which are digested into sugars that ultimately enter the bloodstream. Reducing or eliminating starches such as rice, potatoes, and corn was difficult but achievable. However, I struggled with removing all grain-based bread products from my diet. Living on meat, green vegetables, and salads simply wasn’t enough for a Southern girl raised on Mama’s home cooking. I searched supermarkets, natural food stores, and the Internet for alternative products I could consume without a negative impact on my blood sugar levels. But what I
found was downright depressing. The grain-free products available at the time tasted like cardboard or worse.

I eventually realized that in order to have bread products that I not only could eat, but actually
wanted
to eat, I would probably need to make my own. So I began experimenting with alternative flours. The process was long, tedious, and punctuated with many failures that ended up in the trash can. Because I had no formal training as a baker, my learning curve was rather steep. However, my lack of training also had a huge benefit: I didn’t have any preconceived notions or rules to block my creative explorations, especially with nut and seed flours. After two years and a multitude of baking experiments, Proseed Flour was born, along with a line of baked goods that now consists of more than fifty products—all absolutely delicious. By substituting these products for conventional grain-based baked goods (along with other diet and lifestyle changes), I was actually able to eliminate my need for insulin shots completely.

I’m currently in the process of licensing Proseed Flour products to major food companies. As part of the early process to determine the appropriate markets for these products, our marketing firm, Davis Brand Capital, brought in Peter Reinhart for a taste test. Peter was extremely impressed with the taste and texture of the eight different products that Greg and I presented that day and said that he thought I had achieved new heights in baking with alternative flours. Later, when he was given the opportunity to write a gluten-free baking book for Ten Speed Press, he said, “Let’s go all the way and make it gluten-free, sugar-free, and low-carb” and invited me to be his coauthor.

Although I’ve had no formal training as a baker or chef, I’ve always considered myself an excellent Southern cook, and I’ve always enjoyed creating delicious meals for family and friends. Rest assured that I was equally determined to develop delicious recipes for this book—recipes every bit as good as those using my Proseed Flour. In addition, I wanted to be sure that the recipes are simple enough to be easily duplicated and accessible to people without formal training. Each recipe was developed and tested under Peter’s guidance.

The gluten-free, low-carb alternative flours in these recipes have changed my life and helped heal my body. My hope is that this book becomes an effective tool for those who require an alternative diet, as well as for those who just want great-tasting, healthy baked products. I believe that everyone should eat food that tastes great, and it is even better when great-tasting food is also great for you. Enjoy!

These recipes are designed to meet the dietary needs of people who are sensitive to gluten or have diabetic or prediabetic conditions. There are only small amounts of carbohydrates in most of these recipes, mostly from the nut and seed flours and small amounts of fruit or vegetables. In all of these cases, the carbs are balanced out by the complementary natural fiber in these foods. These are baked goods that have essentially no glycemic load, making it possible for people with blood sugar or insulin concerns to enjoy them freely.

The secret to the success of the recipes in this book is twofold: utilizing a variety of nut and seed flours, and working with alternative, sugar-free sweeteners. You’ll learn all about these ingredients in the chapter “The Basics.” Be sure to read the pantry section, as it provides details on how to make your own nut and seed flours, as well as why we mostly use certain alternative sweeteners (and why you need to do the same). Once you’ve digested that information, you’ll be able to join us in creating the most unique and delicious gluten-free, sugar-free, low-carb baked goods you’ve ever had. As a bonus, these baked goods are not only safe for diabetics and people with gluten sensitivity, but also a good choice for many folks who are looking for a healthful alternative to traditional baked goods. Barring allergies to nuts or other ingredients we call for, these recipes are a perfect fit for anyone on a low-carb diet, such as Atkins, South Beach, the Belly Fat Cure, Sugar Busters, and others, and are also a healthy alternative for kids’ lunch boxes.

Obviously, there is no one diet that works for everyone. If you’re allergic or sensitive to tree nuts, these recipes won’t work for you. Fortunately, there are plenty of specialized cookbooks available, including some with a focus on allergen-free recipes (we’ve listed our favorites in the Resources section). Our mission here is to serve the large and, unfortunately, growing population of people with diabetes, prediabetes, weight loss and obesity struggles, and gluten intolerance. If the innovative recipes in this book accomplish this by offering you new and delicious options, it will be a very good day for us.

These baked goods do, of course, contain calories; however, when used to replace your normal, starch-based baked goods, they will actually help with weight loss. These recipes are free of calories from the sugars and refined grains typically used in baked goods—considered to be “empty” calories because they contain minimal nutrients beyond their carbohydrate. Sugars and refined grains are also rapidly converted into blood sugar (glucose), and if they aren’t quickly burned up by activity, they’re eventually stored as fat.

We believe that everyone will love these recipes, even people without dietary restrictions. It’s true that the baked goods they yield won’t taste like those made with wheat. For that matter,
they also won’t taste like gluten-free baked goods made with rice and tapioca flour—and we view this as a good thing! They have their own distinctive flavor and texture, and we believe that they are extremely delicious and will please your palate. And regardless of dietary restrictions, most folks could benefit from eating fewer sugars and refined carbs, and from introducing more variety into their diet. This book will help you do just that.

All of that said, we imagine you’ve chosen this cookbook because you or someone you love has issues with sugar, gluten, obesity, or carbohydrates. If so, you’re probably well aware of all of the ins and outs of these medical conditions. However, if you have further questions about these topics, the Resources section will point you toward some reputable sources of information. Just to be clear, we aren’t making any health claims or offering a dietary plan in this book. That’s a job for the experts, and we’re happy to refer you to them. However, we will give you just a bit of background information on food
allergies, gluten
sensitivity, obesity, and diabetic considerations in the sections that follow.