Transcript:

This is the Wheat Belly guide to grain free baking. Without grains, like wheat flour, corn starch, corn flour or rice flour, you can recreate delicious, wonderful dishes like cheesecake, birthday cake, cookies, chocolate chip cookies, key lime cupcakes, bagels, muffins, scones — just about anything — using non-grain substitutes.

When you do so, it facilitates weight loss, unlike grains that cause weight gain. These flours and meals don’t cause a rise in blood sugar like grains do. They don’t add inflammation. They don’t feed dysbiosis — disrupted bowel flora. They don’t cause things like joint pains and skin rash like rosacea, seborrhea, like grains do. This is a carefree way of cooking and baking.

We choose our flours and meals very carefully. Find those lists in the Wheat Belly books and the Wheat Belly blog. The most common ones are almond flour, coconut flour, ground golden flax seed, sesame seed flour (an excellent flour) and several others. We choose them carefully for those reasons. We want benign healthy flours and meals to do our baking.

One of the things we give up though, when we don’t use wheat and grains is, we lose some of the rise — the effect that gives bread, for instance, its ability to puff up and become light and airy, as well as stretchiness that’s provided by the gluten in grains. We lose all that, but we can kind of recreate some of those effects. At least it provides us with some familiar substitutes, particularly for people like family and friends who might not know that you’re not cooking without wheat and grains.

One very useful strategy to recreate some of these the effects of grains is to combine or mix your flowers and meals. A very common combination, for instance, would be 3½ cups of almond flour with ¼ cup coconut flour, ¼ cup of ground golden flax seed. That very simple mixture yields a little bit better texture, cohesiveness and lift in your final product. That’s why I have a Wheat Belly all-purpose baking mix and company Wheat Free Market, that I advise, also has an all-purpose baking mix based on a similar type of mixture.

Another strategy used to get better structure and rise out of your baked products is to use more eggs. If the recipe would have called for 2 eggs consider using 3 or even 4 or 6. You can get better rise, better structure, better texture. Don’t be scared of eggs, right? Eggs are full of cholesterol, a fact that we don’t care about. We want more fat. Don’t worry about that ridiculous advice to limit your eggs, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, etc. We do not pay any attention to that ridiculous nonsense. Use more eggs for better baked product end results.

Learn how to use what are called acid-base reactions. It sounds like chemistry, but it’s really just using some very common ingredients. This is all discussed in the Wheat Belly blog post that accompanies this video. One common strategy, for instance, is to use 1 teaspoon of baking soda (which is sodium bicarbonate) with 2 teaspoons of vinegar. That will generate CO₂ (carbon dioxide) bubbles in your product.

There’s a very common combination of them would be 1 teaspoon of baking soda for a ¼ teaspoon of citric acid (acid from citrus fruit). Those are easy ways to generate carbon dioxide that is typically caused by the reaction of yeast and amylopectin in grains. Without grains, you can recreate that by using these acid-base reactions.

One of most helpful strategies to get up generate rise and texture in your foods is to whip your egg whites. Whip until they’re stiff. We’re going to use four eggs, for instance, in a recipe, separate the eggs from the yolks. Whip the egg whites. Use the yolks with the other liquids, let’s say with water or coconut milk — whatever liquid you’re using. After you do the acid-base reaction, then add the egg whites.

I stress that, because if you add the egg whites before you do the acid-base reaction, you can get something called baker’s ammonia, which smells like ammonia, which is very unpleasant — you can’t use the final product. That occurs any kind of baking by the way, so if you’re going to use an acid-base reaction like baking soda and citric acid, or baking soda and vinegar, do that first, and then add your whipped egg whites so you don’t get baker’s ammonia.

Microwaving your dough, your batter, can help. I know some people object the use of microwaves, but I have yet to see any real data showing that microwaving food is deleterious. There’s lots of rumors and internet chatter, some of it from Russia, of all odd places, but I’ve actually never seen any real science. Until somebody produces science that shows that microwaving is deleterious, I use it.

What you do is; you have to put your batter, your dough, into a microwave safe dish or pan, and microwave it. This would be a minute, 1½, 2 minutes. You don’t want to cook it. You just want to generate gas. That gives you about ⅓ more volume in your final product, so that can also help.

Lastly yeast: you know in the Wheat Belly books I left yeast out. Some people have a adverse reaction to yeast. It’s only a few percent, but they have an allergy reaction to yeast that can mimic some of the effects of grains, so I didn’t want to cloud the issue by continuing to include yeast. But, if you’ve been grain free, and you’ve had great results, and your stomach is better, and your irritable bowel syndrome, etc. is gone, you can experiment to see if you can tolerate yeast. Most people can; more than 9 out of 10 people can.

You reintroduce that yeasty flavor and smell, which a lot of people like, and it also gives you better rise. You’ll follow the directions on the yeast that you purchase. It does help to proof it; expose it to water and a little bit of sugar — you add sugar because the yeast likes sugar. Even though you add sugar to your yeast mixture, it consumes the sugar and the sugar should not be present in any substantial amount in your final product because it’s eaten and it’s gone. That’s another way of generating better rise.

You can mix and match these strategies. I like to do such things that using more eggs, using one acid-base reaction, then adding whipped egg whites, and sometimes using yeast, to generate more rise. You’ll find, by the way, the how to use yeast in my Wheat Belly blog post on that topic. You can combine these strategies, depending on what kind of food you’re making. Some recipes don’t require much lift. Some recipes do, like when you’re trying to make a sandwich bread, you want to get the maximum lift that’s possible. Use judgement how much you want to do now.

A lot of the Wheat Belly recipes already incorporate some of these strategies, so you don’t have to think about it. That’s the easy way out of course. You can enjoy — bottom line — you can enjoy wonderful products that have good structure, flavor, and texture, with no grains, none of the deleterious downsides of grain consumption. Just enjoy your scone, cupcake or cookie, without grains