Gluten avoiders saw the future last weekend, and its name was modified starch.
“Oh my God, are you a saint?”
“Are you married?”
Those were the audience reactions when baker Chadwick White passed around samples of his pillowy-soft raised knot rolls Saturday during his presentation at the first Gluten-Free Baking Invitational.
The two-day event at Johnson & Wales University featured baking contests for culinary students and pros, demonstrations from such experts as Deanna Scimio, pastry chef at Fruition, and gluten-free meals and samples from Bob’s Red Mill and other ingredient vendors.
Gluten is the protein component that gives most baked goods a structure to support their rise — and which provokes a digestive autoimmune reaction in approximately one in 133 people. That reaction can range from no symptoms at all to a gamut of digestive and skin reactions that can be severe enough to eventually require hospitalization.
The only treatment is removing gluten from the diet so that the digestive tract can heal — and keeping it out for life. The disorder is called celiac disease. Those who don’t test positive for the disease, but still find they do better without ingesting gluten, usually refer to themselves as gluten-intolerant.
And avoiding gluten usually means giving up the kind of bread White was passing around with his talk. He achieved that result with the help of a blend of two modified starches — one a modified potato, the other a modified tapioca — that aren’t yet available to the public. But the breads he’s developing will be available through Udi’s Gluten-Free, a brand that King Soopers and City Markets are set to carry.
Carol Fenster, Ph.D. and author of “Gluten-Free Quick and Easy,” held up an example of the bricklike, rice-flour-based breads that were all a celiac could hope for 20 years ago. “And we thought ourselves lucky to get it,” she said.
With the help of the (unfortunately named) Expandex, another new modified tapioca starch, she was able to show off a beautiful raised, flax-flecked yeast bread that looked like its gluten-supported cousins. Some of the recipes in her forthcoming cookbook will use Expandex, although the audience remained somewhat skeptical of the complicated chemistry involved in modified starches.
It doesn’t help that modified food starch — sometimes derived from wheat — is an ingredient many celiacs had to learn the hard way to avoid. The additive gives baked goods additional lift, moisture and shelf stability; the tapioca and potato versions perform the same way.
Modified starches aside, the event put on by GF Culinary Productions, Inc. showed celiacs and others the wide range of what was possible without gluten.
Leslie Ratica of Blue Moon Cake Design in Boulder competed with a Poire Williams Napoleon with lavender pastry cream, garnished with triangles of brie rind, that blew the judges away.
Presenter Keith Theodore, sous chef for Charles Court restaurant at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, created a quinoa crepe that he topped with duck cracklings in a chokecherry-accented veal demi-glace.
And winning students Kate Martin and Eric Bushman pleased attendees with a piña colada crunch cookie and a chipotle brownie. Bushman’s brownie with a kick will be featured occasionally at Deby’s Gluten-Free in Denver.
Susan Clotfelter: 303-954-1440 or sclotfelter@denverpost.com
