A decent place to start...for now

books:

	• The Gluten-free Gourmet, Second Edition: Living Well Without Wheat (Owl Books) Bette Hagman Holt Paperbacks, 2000 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Such a Help

We are seniors with a new diagnosis of gluten intolerance. Gotta learn to bake all over again. This book not only gives lots of good recipes, but talks about those strange ingredients and how to exchange them for something else, or for each other. Very helpful

excellent condition

I originally borrowed this book from our local library. Felt very fortunate to find it at a much reduced price. It was in like new condition. I'm very pleased with this purchase.

for more information click here

Gluten-free Gourmet

My daughtert was diagnosed with Celiacs Disease a few months ago and this book has been very helpful. She uses it quite frequently. She has her favorite recipes. Other recipes she hasn't cared for, but overall, very happy with the book.

for more information click here

Great Recipes

This book has many recipes that are easy to follow. They are very good and help satisfy the longing for breads, etc. that people on non-gluten diets miss. Great book.

A decent place to start...for now

Bette Hagman is a pioneer and has performed a great service to those who are diagnosed with celiac disease, and nobody can take that away from her. Unfortunately, she's not much of a baker if this book is any indication. If you are unable to eat wheat, then this isn't a bad place to start. You can make better GF baked goods than you can buy simply by following her recipes to the letter, and if you have no desire to do more than that, then by all means buy this book.

BUT, there are problems with many of the recipes in this book. They are inconsistent. So much so that I wonder if she's even tried them all. Then there are telling errors that make one wonder whether she truly understands what she'd doing.

For example:

Everyone's favorite (and mine too), the Yeast-Rising Thick Pizza Crust has 4 cups of various flours and 1 tsp of salt. Result: fairly flat (I double the salt). However, the thin crusts on the previous 2 pages have 1 cup of flours and call for the same 1 tsp of salt, the equivalent of quadrupling the salt on the yeast crust. Result: a salty crust made edible only by diluting the salt with the toppings.

All of the breads that I've tried are flat. She tends to use 1/4 tsp of salt per cup of flour (including the yeast crust), which isn't enough, at least not for me. I like about 1/2 tsp per cup, or the bread has little taste.

Then there are outright boneheaded things like my personal cookbook pet peeve: 3 tsp. The Challah recipe calls for 3 tsp of xanthan gum. And the muffins. Wow. She warns you not to overbeat your muffins! This is gluten-free flour! You can't overbeat it! The lack of basic food knowledge and kitchen arithmetic is depressing.

The buttermilk biscuits are a mess. They're by no means a cut-out biscuit, they're drop biscuits. But even then they have nothing to hold them together and just crumble. You can't very well butter something that disintegrates when you look at it wrong.

I try to always follow a recipe exactly the first time, just to see what I have to work with. I can't really do that with this book. The times I have, the results have gone from mediocre to disastrous.

If you get (or have) this book, then if nothing else, remember 1/2 tsp salt per cup of flour, and everything will be so much better. If you have another GF cookbook and can wait, then rumor has it that Chef Richard Coppedge, Professor in Baking and Pastry Arts at the CIA, is going to publish a gluten-free cookbook sometime soon. The only thing I have to go on is the word of a current CIA student, but I hope it's true. I am personally looking forward to it, and will be getting it as soon as I see it.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

An updated, beautifully designed edition of the essential resource for people who cannot tolerate wheat or gluten.

With her four cookbooks, Bette Hagman has brought tasty food Whack into the lives of over one million people who are intolerant of the gluten in wheat, oats, barley, or rye, or who are allergic to wheat. The premier creator of delicious gluten-free fare, Hagman has spent more than twenty years developing recipes using special flours for pizza, pasta, breads, pies, cakes, and cookies. Containing over 200 recipes updated to include new flours, ingredients, and tips, the second edition of The Gluten-free Gourmet makes cooking gluten-free faster and more fulfilling than ever before. The Gluten-free Gourmet is more than just recipes, however. A complete sourcebook on how to live healthily with celiac disease or wheat intolerance, it features important new information on developing a celiac diet, raising a celiac child, avoiding hidden glutens, eating well while traveling or in the hospital, and locating and ordering from suppliers of gluten-free food and flour. This and Hagman's other books in the Gluten-free Gourmet series are recognized by health newsletters around the world as the best in this special diet category.

for more information click here

hot