[alert variation=”alert-info”]Publisher: Lifelong Books
Formats: Paperback, eBook, Kindle
Purchase: Powell’s | Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | iBooks[/alert]

Should you have the misfortune of gluten intolerance yet love baking and eating breads, Gluten-free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread ought to be on your kitchen bookshelf. Author Nicole Hunn experimented endlessly with replacing the offending gluten protein in flour and end up with baked breads just like traditional bakery breads. She found one, whey protein isolate made from milk protein that serves this purpose well and in some cases also xantham gum. (Both are natural organic substances.)

“Not only you will learn to make gluten-free yeast bread that rises beautifully and reliably, but even working with the dough will be a pleasure.”

The first forty pages of the book prepare you with information, equipment, troubleshooting and terminology, including very nice thumbnail photos illustrating techniques. Then Hunn gives six flour recipes, each for a different type of baking (e.g. bread, pastry, all-purpose). These you can prepare ahead of time and are the bases of gluten-free baking. In the remainder of the book you’ll find a huge collection of recipes of traditional breads, artisan breads, rolls, bagels, muffins, crêpes and so on. The recipes and her preparation instructions are very good. The layout, unfortunately, is poor – most recipes start on the right-hand page and continue overleaf. This is most inconvenient for the baker who needs to page back and forth. The index has poor cross-referencing.

[signoff predefined=”Social Media Reminder” icon=”facebook”][/signoff]