A Feast for Geeks

Seeking some new books for my Kindle, I was browsing Amazon for exciting new culinary ideas and chanced upon a tome that could have been written just for me: Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. Was there ever a more fortuitous publication in the history of the world? What riches! The work contains a good deal of info on gluten and its mysterious ways, which I will be scrutinizing in the days to come. Although I have not yet had the time to study its wisdom in great depth, some thoughts on gluten and cake-baking immediately leaped out at me from its electronic pages.

Clever Jeff conceptualizes cakes and their gluten content in terms I have never come across before and that I anticipate will be extremely handy during my baking experiments in the months ahead. He distinguishes between high-ratio cake batters and low-ratio cake batters and defines them as follows. A high-ratio cake is one where there is more sugar than flour (by weight); more eggs than fat (by weight); and more liquid than sugar (including the liquid in the eggs : guess how that is measured). Low-ratio cakes, presumably, are all the other ones. His point is that high-ratio cakes don't contain a high proportion of gluten-producing flour and that gluten development itself is hindered by the high percentage of sugar and fat. Isn't that cool? His conclusion is that the texture of high-ratio cakes will have a finer crumb than others.

My conclusion is that high-ratio cakes might necessarily lend themselves to gluten-free flours. Interestingly enough, two of my most successful baking experiments (frangipane and financiers, neither of which required xanthan gum for a successful outcome) were high-ratio cakes, or near enough, although I didn't know it at the time. Eureka - a whole new way of looking at gluten-free baking possibilities!

In a serendipitous, simultaneous development, my FRiV (Field Researcher in Virginia) last week carried out extensive pancake studies involving King Arthur Gluten-Free Flour and reported encouraging results. Although I had purchased some KAGFF during my Whole Foods trip of a few weeks back, it has since languished untried in my pantry, my attention having been distracted by all the boxed mixes I purchased during the same expedition. Somewhat disheartened by these products, I have been reluctant to undertake new g/f baking challenges, but this aligning of the stars inspired me once more. 

I retrieved one of the unopened boxes and compared its ingredients to those of Bob and his Red Mill. They were different, all right. The KAGFF is made from rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and whole grain brown rice flour. It lacks the chickpea flour, white sorghum flour, and fava bean flour that I think makes Bob's product a little too assertive for butter cakes and other plain fare. A winner, perhaps?

Armed with Jeff's recipe for high-ratio Pumpkin Cake, a fresh box of KAGFF, and a cup of pumpkin puree left over from Thanksgiving's dessert mousse, I set to work with new-found confidence and the joie de vivre that comes from a couple of days off work. Tune in for my next exciting installment, where I reveal the degree to which my theory about adapting high-ratio recipes holds true under the cold light of day.