gluten-free fleur de sel chocolate chip cookies = amazing

I love to bake. Of course, I enjoy cooking dinner, especially when there are tons of vegetables and herbs in the kitchen, but baking is different. It might be something about the logic embedded in it - a certain kind of predictable math. Equation : flour+egg+butter+sugar+etc@350*10min = cookie.

I haven't been eating wheat and relatives since January. An illness a few years ago seems to have left me with some intolerances, the gluten-filled grains among them. Up until January I hadn't really given much thought to gluten, and to all the magical things it can do. Experimenting with gluten-free flours has for the most part been disappointing - cookies that spread over the baking sheet and crumble when touched, biscuits that really remind me of a bowl of brown rice.

There have been a few successes, variations on these financiers, macarons - things that are easy to make gluten-free. But my attempts at chocolate chip cookies, while sometimes good crumbled onto ice cream, have not really felt like chocolate chip cookies.

Yesterday, I tried out a recipe from the beautiful blog of Aran Goyoaga, Cannelle et Vanille. I made her gluten-free chewy chocolate chip cookies with low expectations, and I was astounded. They are sooo good. They are not just approximation / imitation cookies, they actually are chocolate chip cookies. Hooray!

wheat-free baking

I have recently had to cut wheat and rye, among other things, out of my diet for health reasons. (It is not to avoid gluten - but rather the sugars (fructans) in wheat that can exacerbate other types of sugar malabsorption.) Of course I miss eating bread, and living in the plateau neighbourhood of Montreal, the boulangeries every few blocks offer abundant temptations. But what I missed most was the ability to take out flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and make something. The act of baking is so calming, and is what I was craving most of all.

The first few forays into gluten-free baking were disasters. You cannot simply substitute other flours in for wheat flours - I learned this the hard way! More recently I have found some recipes that, while different from the wheat-based classics, are also delicious.

Yesterday I made the chocolate and hazelnut financiers from Béa of La Tartine Gourmande. I substituted almond flour for hazelnut flour, and sorghum for amaranth, and the results were delectable. Now I am even more enticed by the new Tartine Gourmande cookbook!