About

Allergy free baking is an unsteady science of near misses and numerous failures. Not an activity for the faint-of-heart. Or the novice. Baking was not a part of my childhood experience. I didn't spend lazy afternoons in the kitchen with mom, learning family-honed recipes. There were no family-honed recipes. Her family was lucky to have eaten a baked good while growing up. She was the youngest of six, born to Irish parents in New York City during the 1920's. To say money was tight is a kindness. Her Irish mam worked most of her life to put food on the table. Baking was a luxury they could ill-afford.

There's no boo-hoo here. Just facts. The first recipe I remember my mother baking was the one on the back of a Nestle's Toll House® Chocolate Chips package in the 1960's. Delicious, but hardly a culinary stretch. I didn't have an honest-to-goodness, made from scratch cookie until my oldest sister took cooking classes in college. Boy, were those ginger creams amazing! Some day I will have to adapt that recipe. I have it somewhere.

I first hopped onto the GFDFEFSY bandwagon many years ago when a doctor recommended we try the diet for our son. He was diagnosed with autism when he was three and half. After many crazy diets and alternative therapies, we settled into a Lovaas program that altered the course of his life in a very good way. He still had anxiety and attention deficit problems, but he made great strides.

We learned about DAN (Defeat Autism Now) and hooked up with Dr. Sidney Baker. He recognized several classic signs of food allergens - flush cheeks, hyperactivity, dazed, fog-like demeanor, chronic ear infections, etc. He ordered IgE and IgG food allergy blood tests: six vials worth. Our poor boy. It was worth the agony of putting him through it, though. We hit the allergen mother lode: wheat (all grains), dairy, eggs, soy, oranges, berries, sesame, soy . . . the list was endless. Daunting. But we did it. We pulled all offending foods from his diet and suddenly he wasn't living on antibiotics anymore.

It was tough to find food replacements back then. Ener-G offered some products, but health food stores were just finding a niche. There was no Amazon.com to order gluten-free flours or acquire specialty binders like Xanthan gum. Xanthan gum. Whoever heard of such a thing? It sounded Klingon. My bread attempts looked Klingon. It felt Klingon, baking with so few options and zero experience.

We persevered. I didn't bake much. What I did was not very edible. When we moved from New Jersey to Oregon, I renewed my efforts to bake. The west coast was far more health food-friendly, so products were more accessible. I had some meager success, but most attempts - especially bread without eggs - were not pretty. Thankfully, these same stores were stocked with a growing variety of gluten-free products. I hopped off the baking bandwagon and didn't look back.

Until now. I gave a run-down why in my first post.  Suffice it to say, we slowly lost our health and are now determined to regain it. I'm ready to rumble. But I'm a sucky baker. I don't know jack about food chemistry. Why do some baked products rise like the sun only to collapse like a cheap ironing board? You got me. But I'm about to find out.

There are many wonderful sites out there that deal specifically with Gluten-free (GF) baking or dairy-free (DF) baking (or CF, casein-free, as it is more universally know), but few sites deal with the whole enchilada: GF, DF, egg-free (EF), corn-free (CF), soy-free (SF),  yeast-free (YF) and sugar-free (ran out of acronyms). I've stumbled on one or two, but baking tips aren't always as easy to glean as recipes. I'm eternally grateful for these recipes, but I need my own baking cheat sheets to get me through the training period. 

Here I will compile my misadventures in food chemistry. Welcome to allergyland. I will be your chemist for this journey. And since I'm not much of one, the ride should be interesting.