Tag: gluten | Apartment Therapy

What's the Deal with Xanthan Gum?

Unless you do a lot of gluten-free baking, you might not have come across xanthan gum before - at least not in a recipe. Flip over a jar of salad dressing or a carton of ice cream to read the ingredie...

Product Review: Trader Joe's All-Purpose Flour

Trader Joe's certainly caused quite a hubbub when they decided to stop carrying King Arthur Flour and switch over to a store brand. We saw the new Trader Joe's all-purpose flour on the shelves for the...

Food Science: Why Bagels are Boiled

We grew up on bagels, and taking a bite of that warm, ultra-chewy bread is still one of our favorite food experiences. Ask any good bagel baker and they'll tell you that the key to that chewy crust an...

Vital Wheat Gluten: What Is It and When Should It Be Used?

Every once in a while in our baking, we come across a recipe that calls for a tablespoon or two of vital wheat gluten. Since it's almost always listed as "optional" and since the ingredient was hard t...

What's the Difference? Cake Flour, Pastry Flour, All-Purpose Flour, and Bread Flour

If you make bread every weekend or have an obsession with cakes, it makes sense to keep specific flours for those recipes on-hand. But what about the rest of us? Is there such a big difference between...

Baker's Techniques: How to do the Windowpane Test when Kneading Bread

The windowpane test is one of the best ways to tell if you've sufficiently kneaded your bread dough, though it can sound like a pretty bizarre instruction when you come across it in a recipe! Here's w...

Kitchen Science: Demystifying Gluten

Ah, gluten. Bread bakers love it and pastry chefs keep it at a respectful distance. So what's the deal with gluten and what can we oh-so-humble home cooks do about it? All flour contains a certain pe...