Episode 02 | Bakery Fresh Gluten-Free Cookies at Home

Enjoy food, enjoy travel, enjoy life. This is travel gluten free by Elikqitie.

This is episode one five tips for bakery fresh gluten free cookies at home.

Well welcome back to the show. Hopefully you have heard the trailer and you are back. If you are, I'm so excited that you're back with us again. If you are, did not hear the trailer and you're here, welcome to the show for the first time. So I'd like to start off the show by thanking my listeners. So you guys are my first listeners. Thank you so much. I appreciate you listening to the podcast and love sharing this information with you. And I'd also like to thank my very first Patreon supporter Jeff Shumate for signing onto sponsor travel gluten free podcast. So thank you Jeff. I appreciate your support. So this episode is about getting those fresh gluten free cookies at home. So you see them in the bakery and you want to get them at home because you go out to a bakery with a friends, right?

And usually you don't have any hope of getting anything to eat. But sometimes you can go there and you see gluten free cookies cause that's the most common thing. If somebody makes something gluten free, it's going to be a cookie. And so you see them and they're calling to you. So you get them and you bring them home and eat them. But what about making that yourself? How do you make cookies that smell and taste great? So there are some secret sauce ingredients that I found, which makes gluten free home baked cookies a lot better. So grab a pen and paper or you can just replay this podcast or check out the show notes at TravelGlutenFree.me. So here we go. The number one is bake at a lower temperature. So gluten free flour is really dry. And the reason it is dry is because it does not have gluten in it.

So gluten is like the glue. Okay? It's the protein, but it makes it, it makes glue and it makes the regular cookies with wheat really soft. But since gluten free flour does not have that, um, it makes the flour dry out quickly in the oven. And especially since I live in a really dry place, I have double dry, uh, things to deal with. So no gluten and I live in a dry environment. So what you want to do is you want to reduce the temperature by about 20 degrees when you're cooking gluten free cookies. So reducing the temperature means you're using less heat, so they're less likely to dry out. You'll get softer cookies. So for example, like if, if I'm reading a recipe and it calls for 350 degrees, I try baking it at about 325 and that usually works out. Even if it's a gluten free recipe, I'll bake it a little bit lower temperature.

But if it's a regular recipe and I'm converting it to a gluten free recipe, I will do the whole 20 to 25 degrees cooler because that really helps with preventing your cookies to dry out. So number one, bake it at a lower temperature by about 20 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit. The other thing you need to do since you're baking it at a lower temperature is you need to bake them a little bit longer. So if your recipe calls for 10 to 12 minutes, probably 12 to 15 is going to be good. You definitely want to keep a good watch on it because gluten free cookies tend to burn way quicker than regular cookies. And the reason is is because that flours are really dry because of the lack of gluten.

So that's definitely one of the challenges you have, but bake them a little bit longer. I would suggest maybe putting them on for a minute or two between checking not any longer than two minutes for sure. Just check them every minute and see. All right the number three suggestion I have for you is to melt your butter, because I found that melting butter gives them an easier chance to flatten out. Um, if you can't eat butter like me and you're dairy intolerant, I have found a great alternative and you probably have heard of this. It's a mass market product called Smart Balance. So there's other dairy alternatives out there. This one I liked the best because it has a good butter flavor. It's not a really fake butter flavor cause I don't like that, it also has good fats in it, so you're getting a good fatty acids with it.

But definitely try melting your butter when you put it in there. And I also add a little more butter too, that sometimes helps. Number four is I also add coconut oil. Now you definitely don't want to add coconut oil if you are allergic to coconut. And please don't add any of these things if you are allergic to them because obviously that would be a really bad idea. But adding coconut oil, so I found adding a little bit of coconut oil increases the moisture a bit and I usually put about an eighth of a cup or like two to three tablespoons and I use virgin coconut oil. I find that just helps adding a little bit of moisture, especially since I'm in a really dry area. So number four is add coconut oil.

All right. Number five, sans the eggs. So you don't want to use eggs in your cookies and I found this especially because not only am I in a dry climates and then cooking gluten free, but I'm also at a high altitude, and so things tend to blow up on me really easily. So if you're at a lower altitude, you may, you may want to try this, but since I'm in a higher altitude, it will blow the cookies up and it will make them really puffy and then they don't cook on the inside and it makes them too cakey. Like I don't like my cookies really cake like, so the end result is that you use eggs, especially if you're at a high altitude your cookies won't flatten out when they're baking and this is frustrating because then like I said before, your cookies don't cook all the way through and then you're over baking them and then they're dry.

So I would say, try your cookie recipe without eggs all together. So those are my five tips for bakery, fresh gluten free cookies at home. You may have, if you have a tip, please go to my website at www.travelglutenfreepodcast.com on my blog and add that tip under the comment. I would love to hear it if you have found other ways to make your gluten free cookies at home taste awesome. So definitely check out my blog and leave your comment on there. I would love to hear from you. Thank you again for listening to my podcast. I really appreciate your time. There are lots of podcasts out there you could listen to and I'm really glad that you took the time out today to listen to episode one, five tips for bakery, fresh gluten free cookies at home.

So if you'd like to connect with me, definitely check out my blog at www.travelglutenfreepodcast.com You can also connect with me on Twitter and Facebook at #travelGFme and you can also connect on Instagram at travelglutenfree.me. My Instagram page and my Facebook - I always post lots of great pictures and all the pictures I do post on my social media, I have eaten that food and taken that picture so they are not pictures that I've gotten from somewhere else, that is actual food I have eaten and or made, so it is the real deal. 

If you'd like to become a show sponsor just like Jeff Shumate on Patreon for as little as $3 a month, you can become a show sponsor and I'll mention your name in my podcast as well along with some other great thank you gifts including access to my private travel, gluten free Facebook group. Your donation definitely helps me cover costs for my show. So remember my gluten free friends, my gffs. You can enjoy food, enjoy travel, and enjoy life. This is liquidity, thanking you like gluten free trends for listening.