New Mum’s Food Adventures

Straight off the bat I have to mention it is not vegan. I have heard you can use coconut oil and get the same results. I do these gluten free foods for my family members who have celiac and they are not vegan.

Above picture is my third puff pastry treat of cheese with some herbs. A bit of salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder and a gentle sprinkle of Smokey paprika with pizza blend shredded cheese. These were so tasty and easy to make.

This was my plain and thick test piece from a misshapen trimming. I wanted to see if ur was actually going to puff. I was in disbelief that it had worked.

This is the same piece torn. It had the lovely soft moist interior thin layers. I cooked it on around 190 C in a fan forced oven. 200 was too high and 180 not high enough. I have trouble guessing the right temp sometimes. It had a light egg wash for browning the top. It needs it or it won’t brown at all.

This is a photo of some of the layers. The part where there’s not many layers is where I didn’t have enough butter. I screwed up. I didn’t add enough butter and added more layer in the mix. I grated cold butter and added it into the fold and it fixed my pastry. So that also meant I had to do the layers again and it was rescued.

I did not do enough fat to flour. So after making this mistake if you attempt gluten free puff pastry, make the ratio 1:1 flour to fat. I used a cheap butter block and plain gluten free flour. Specifically the Woolworths brand as I have good success baking with it. Next up I plan to use organic butter and orgran plain gluten free flour to see how that goes. Orgran is pretty reliable for results and if it works then it will give me other options if I can’t get my preferred flour.

Puff pastry that’s gluten free is very expensive. In my home there are four of us. 3 have celiac and I don’t. I’m on board with GF because I feel like it would be a tease for me to eat gluten and because my toddler wants to eat what I’m eating. I want to share my food with him and reduce fussiness where possible so I am completely gluten free. One thing everyone misses are good and tasty meat pies, cheese and bacon beef pies and chicken pies and of course a classic sausage roll. This pastry is perfect for these and it’s not weak. The store bought GF puff pastry can be very weak or brittle. It can be so fussy. But this homemade one is strong and I didn’t even add any xanthum gum. Why? Well truthfully I forgot to. I will next time to improve the texture. It worked but it could have been better. I tried the trending upside down pastry and it worked perfectly fine. Tasted good too. This opens up more treats for my family as well. We have some birthdays coming up in a few months and it will be nice to be able to make some classic party pastry foods.

I found two recipes on YouTube and went by that for the pastry. After this experiment I plan to make some pies. Including Shepard’s a pie and anything else I can come up with.

But after I am satisfied with my results, I will post a proper recipe because so far I am always changing something to suit the fact that our Australian GF flour seems to be different to everyone else’s. It didn’t take very long and I sped up the process by resting my pastry in the freeze for 15 minutes at a time.

Have you tried making your own gluten free puff pastry?