Gluten-Free Muffin

Update (04/01/2008): If you’re interested in more gluten-free recipes/info, visit http://www.simplygf.com

Due to Jason’s wheat allergy, Susan has been on the quest to find wheat bread substitute to add to his diet. Last year, Susan bought a bread maker hoping that she could bake some GF (gluten-free bread). Unfortunately, all the bread machine recipes require ingredients that cannot be found here. She ended up giving the bread maker away and resorted to traditional baking.

A friend sent us several ready-made baking mix from U.S. but they are expensive, not to mention shipping cost. What we need is something we can actually make and bake from scratch. There are plenty of GF bread/muffin recipes to be found on the web, however, getting some of the ingredients are still quite tricky. Either they don’t sell some of the ingredients here or we don’t know what they are called in Chinese.

One of the key ingredient to GF bread recipes is xanthan gum. It’s the gluten substitute that makes bread taste like bread. Without it, bread will taste stale/flat and flaky. It took a while before we were able to find xanthan gum. Susan searched Taobao (China’s EBay) and it was discovered that Chinese people use xanthan gum, not for cooking, but for cosmetics! How it’s used, we have absolutely no idea, but whatever the case, we ordered some online and the smallest size they ship was 5lb! (FYI: All you need is 1 tsp of xanthan for every cup of gluten-free flour substitute!) This bag will last us for the rest of Jason’s life.

Aside from xanthan gum, there are various GF flour substitutes. It’s usually combination of rice flour, brown rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and/or corn starch. Again, things that are commonly found in any grocery stores in the U.S. are difficult to find here! You’d think rice flour should be easy to find, but we looked many places and so far, only found them in the import section (from Thailand). Tapioca starch, we weren’t sure what that is translated into Chinese, but we did find something called cassava starch. Susan thinks it’s the same thing as tapioca starch (and we’ll use it until someone tells us what tapioca starch is in Chinese and where we can find them). Potato starch was first found at another import store, but one time at Carrefour (Big Thumb Plaza), Susan found some local potato starch and bought like 10 bags. Who knows when the next time she’ll find them again.

Finally, after several months of gathering the key ingredients for GF flour substitute, Susan went back online to search for bread recipes. And she found a simple gluten-free muffin recipe (see below) that uses only potato starch, egg, salt, sugar, and lemon! Sounded too good to be true (or tasty), so she decided to give it a try. It doesn’t even use xanthan gum or the other flours!

Preparation time was about half an hour. We didn’t have lemon so Susan used orange instead. She added some Xinjiang raisins into the batter, poured the mixture into muffin pan (from Ikea!), baked it for 12 minutes, and voila! The muffins came out looking beautiful and best of all, they tasted just like REAL muffins! Wow! This is amazing! No need for all the other ingredients! Just potato starch! The trick is beating the eggs (separated) until they are foamy.

Potato Starch Muffin

Ingredients:

4 eggs, separated
1 T sugar
2 T cold water
3/4 c potato starch
1/2 t salt
grated rind of 1/2 lemon

Directions:

Beat the yolks until light. Gradually add the sugar. Beat until light and creamy. Add the water and grated rind. Slowly sift in the potato starch. Blend well.

In another bowl, beat the egg whites with the salt at low speed until frothy; increase the speed to high and beat until peaks form. Carefully fold the stiffly beaten egg whites into the yolk batter. Fill greased muffin cups half full. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Yields 12 muffins.