On Wednesday I made shortbread cookies. Basic recipe is from the Rose’s Christmas Cookies book.
Then Thursday I had the urge to try and make a gluten free version for a friend that was coming to visit. I did a little reading on substitutes and decided to replace the AP flour in the recipe with rice and oat flours. I made my own. To my surprise, when I measured a half cup of rice, and then ground it up in my spice grinder, the resulting flour was about the same volume. I thought it would settle, but it appears to have been fluffy enough to compensate for that. The same thing happened with the oats.
My Recipe:
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
– Put these into the food processor and run on 1 for about a minute to make the sugar extra fine.
1 1/4 cup butter
– Cut into cubes and add to food processor. Run on 1 just until combined.
1 1/4 cup white rice flour
1 1/4 cup oat flour
– I ground these myself from whole and it was a little crunchy. Not as flour fine as I would like. I’ll have to look into a better mill for grinding, or just buy the flour in the store next time.
– Add these to the food processor and pulse until combined. You shouldn’t see any more dry flour. Don’t over process any of these steps. It will be crumbly beads of dough, not a solid mass.
– Scrape the dough into a mixing bowl and hand knead the dough into a solid ball. If it feels too sticky, you might want to refrigerate this for 30 minutes or so.
Bake on 275 for about 50 minutes.
Remember that every oven is a little different, and also that you don’t want shortbread to get golden, so you are pulling it out before it develops any browning at all. This might take some experimenting to figure out when it’s completely baked, but not yet golden.
Quality of Resulting Cookies
As I mentioned above, the rice and oat flours weren’t fine enough, so they’re a little crunchier than I’d like. That crunchiness might just be the rice flour not being fine enough. It might work if it were all oat flour.
They’re still tasty and quite edible, and after a conversation with another friend about it, they were dubbed “Yummy Dirt”.
In the photo above you see the regular shortbread cookies at the top, and the Yummy Dirt below. I don’t really think anyone would mistake them for shortbread at this point. I’ll have to try and improve that, or simply give them a new name.
Oats may not be entirely gluten free, according to Caroline (the gal with the gluten-free diet), because they are often processed through the same equiptment as wheat. She had a mild reaction to the cookies. UGH!
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