xanthan gum

Whether you're gluten-free for health reasons or personal preference, you might have thought you had to kiss all desserts goodbye. Fortunately, there are ways around baking without the gluten, although it can be a difficult feat to exclude this sticky little ingredient; baking without gluten can sometimes leave desserts crumbling apart. Fear not! Here are four pantry must haves to replace wheat flour; use individually or combine for a close second to the real thing. Plus, we have a couple hints that will make g-free baking a walk in the park.

You might need to tweak your recipe slightly when shifting gears from your gluten-ous menu. You can combine some of these ingredients to decrease the density of your final product.

Flour Substitutes

• Grains: Flours made from grains most resemble traditional wheat flour and are best used when baking cakes and breads. On this safe list are brown or white rice flour, sorghum flour, millet, and teff. Or try a gluten-free all-purpose flour like Bob's Red Mill, which contains a mixture of these flours. The label on Bob's Red Mill g-free flour provides helpful tips for mixing in starches.
• Starches: Even though we don't often use starches when baking at home, you can add one or two of these options to a gluten-free flour in order to make a faux-gluten consistency. Potato starch, cornstarch, arrowroot, and tapioca starch are all g-free substitutions.
• Non-Grains: These nut "flours" are great for adding substance. They can boost the protein content of your dish twice as much as other flours do. Just keep in mind that they will also increase the density. Peanut, almond, hazelnut, soybean, garbanzo bean, fava bean, and chickpea flours are all void of the grain product completely. They are, however, slightly more difficult to compress, so make sure to use an additional binding agent when baking with these ingredients.
• Oats: This seemingly innocent grain creates a tricky situation. While some people with celiac disease, the gluten intolerance allergy, can digest oats, others cannot. Oats and wheat are often grown together and processed in the same facility, so oats can pick up traces of gluten. Some smaller companies are now exclusively producing oats to offer guaranteed gluten-free oats; if you do have celiac, make sure to read the labels.

Keep reading to learn about binding agents.

If you read labels to steer clear from any sketchy sounding ingredients, you've probably come across xanthan gum in random items from ice cream to salad dressings, from toothpaste to gluten-free desserts. Xanthan gum sounds artificial, but what is it really, and why is it in so many products?

Without getting too scientific, xanthan gum is a carbohydrate created through fermentation. The process begins with a sugar from a soy, wheat, dairy, or corn source. A strain of bacteria, called Xanthomonas campetris, is added to the sugar to create a gum, or a slimy substance, which works as a colorless and tasteless thickener, stabilizer, and emulsifier.

With the ever popularized gluten-free dessert craze, many famous bakeries, like Babycakes NYC, depend on xanthan gum to give wheat-free cakes and cookies that gummy, "gluten-y" quality. Erin McKenna, founder of Babycakes, diligently chooses all of her ingredients because her bakery is devoted to offering sweets free of wheat, gluten, dairy, casein, and eggs. She recommends Bob's Red Mill Xanthan Gum, which is certified gluten- and dairy-free and made from a combination of non-GMO corn and soy sugars. If you're attempting some gluten-free baking of your own, it is recommended that when converting a flour-based recipe to gluten-free, add one to two teaspoons of xanthan gum for cakes and up to one teaspoon of xanthan gum for cookies.

If you have any sensitivities or allergies to soy, wheat, dairy, or corn, be sure to play detective and figure out the original source of the xanthan gum before ingesting it. Some gluten-free folks claim that xanthan gum causes intestinal distress. And according to Web MD, xanthan gum can work as a laxative; it swells in the intestinal tract and activates digestion. If you experience uncomfortable bloating after eating products that contain xanthan gum, try substituting guar gum, which is made from powdered guar beans and produces a comparable gummy texture — hopefully without any side effects.

What's your favorite gluten-free product or recipe?