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I am so pleased to be participating in this month's Gluten Free Ratio Rally, founded by Shauna from the Gluten Free Girl, and hosted this month by Lauren of Celiac Teen.
This month's assignment is scones, something I have made over the years in various forms. When I first learned to make scones about 10 years ago, I used the traditional ingredients: white flour, butter and cream. However, as I became more health conscious, I stopped making scones altogether. Only recently did I revisit scone making after I discovered my 8-year old son was allergic to gluten, dairy and eggs, and also should avoid yeast in his diet.
When I first came across the Gluten-Free Ratio Rally last month, I was intrigued. The concept behind this Rally is that once you understand what the proper ratios are for key ingredients in a recipe (e.g., flour, fat, liquid, egg), whether it's for pancakes or quick breads, you can easily substitute ingredients and be assured consistent results each time. These ratios are by weight, however, not measured in cups and spoons as most of us are used to.
Different flours have different weights, and this is especially true in gluten-free baking, where flours range from lighter flours like tapioca starch to denser bean flours. As a fairly new gluten-free baker, I knew that participating in the Gluten-Free Ratio Rally would be a wonderful opportunity for me to learn how to bake with ratios, and bring more consistency to my gluten-free baking, as well as to meet a group of talented gluten-free bakers.
I've always baked using measuring cups and spoons, and although I have read that the more accurate way to bake is to weigh out the ingredients, I have yet to bake using a kitchen scale. Over the years, I had read that serious bakers (and professional bakers) weigh their ingredients, and although I was curious, I wasn't sure it was worth the trouble for a home cook like myself...until I started baking gluten-free.
Before I started baking gluten-free, I never had trouble substituting whole wheat flour for white flour when I used measuring cups. However, during the past several months as I've experimented with gluten-free baking, I've had a number of successes, and a number of bloopers. My natural tendency is to take a "normal" recipe and substitute gluten-free flours for the wheat flour called for in a recipe, cup for cup, not gram for gram, or ounce for ounce.
However, after reading through the collection of posts from last month's Gluten Free Ratio Rally, it became obvious that the most reliable way to bake consistently is to weigh all the ingredients out. In this way, any flour, fat or liquid can be mixed or matched in a recipe. Millet flour can be mixed with quinoa flour and brown rice flour, olive oil can be substituted for butter, applesauce can be substituted for eggs or some of the fat. Now that I understand this concept, it's no wonder I had a few bloopers when I started mixing a variety of gluten-free flours, all with different densities.
As I started putting together my scone recipe for this month's Gluten Free Ratio Rally, I referred to several scone recipes I had made in the past before I started baking gluten free. I like my scones moist on the inside as opposed to dry, so I decided to try a scone recipe that included eggs (or in this case, an egg equivalent). The ratio I followed was 3:1:1:1 Flour/Fat/Liquid/Egg.
For my flours of choice, I used a mixture of millet, quinoa, sweet sorghum, chestnut flour (which I used for the first time in this recipe!), glutinous rice flour (to help bind the ingredients together), and tapioca starch (to lighten up the dough a bit). After making a few batches of scones, I chose a ratio of flours to starch of 1:1, as too little starch resulted in a rather dense and heavier scone. In total, I used 300 grams of Gluten Free Flour Mix.
Fortunately, I have a kitchen scale that I purchased several years back when a large retailer went out of business. It's not fancy, but it does the job. One thing I hadn't thought about was how easy weighing the flours out was. It was so much easier and faster than measuring using cups. I just added one flour at a time, one right after the other,
