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FEMALE SPEAKER: Hello everyone and thank you for coming.
I'm excited to introduce Jeanne Sauvage of "Gluten-Free Baking
for the Holidays."
And thank you Jeanne for coming.
JEANNE SAUVAGE: So, thank you very much for having me.
I'm honored to be here.
Let me get a sense of who here is gluten free themselves.
OK it looks like a good majority.
And how many people are here just
because either their friends and family are gluten free,
or they're just interested in the topic?
OK.
Great, thank you for coming.
So I wrote a book on-- or a cookbook--
on gluten-free baking.
Specifically, gluten free baking for the holidays.
And I call my journey to getting to this point of the road
to deliciousness.
So because one of my goals with gluten
free baking is to make things that taste and feel good.
There's no point in baking if it's gross, really.
So I wanted to give you a little taste of why
wrote a book about gluten free baking.
How I got here.
And so to give you a little bit of my history
I was diagnosed as gluten intolerant
after the birth of my daughter in 2000.
And apparently that's very common.
Autoimmune disorders are often triggered by a body trauma.
And a body trauma can be something like pregnancy,
childbirth, a very bad cold, a car accident.
And so the more I talked to people
who are gluten intolerant, the more
I realized that this trigger point
is very common with a lot of people.
Now with me, I was completely shocked by the entire thing.
I had no idea that this was possible.
But the more I thought about it, the more
I realized that my funny tummy my whole life
made a lot of sense actually.
And so I'm one of those people that my entire life, even
before my diagnosis, I always felt bad when I ate something.
So I had stomach ache, diarrhea, bloating, the whole nine yards.
And this happens every time I ate.
And every time I went to a doctor they would just say,
oh well I guess you just have a funny stomach
so just be careful with it.
And that really wasn't that helpful.
And also I spent a whole lot of my life just feeling bad,
which isn't great.
Does this story sound familiar to anybody?
OK so this is actually something.
There is some statistic out there
that once you start on the road to trying to figure out
what's wrong with your system when you're reacting to gluten
it's something like 12 years from starting
the search for the reason to the actual diagnosis.
And I think the reason for this is a lot of doctors
up until now have been trained that gluten intolerance is
so rare that there's no point in even looking for it.
It's so rare it doesn't exist.
So they didn't even think of it as an option.
So my whole life I've never had a doctor talk about gluten.
I don't even think I knew what gluten
was until I was diagnosed.
So my first question of my doctor,
and it may be your first question as well,
is what is gluten?
Because they kind of say, oh, hey,
you can't eat gluten, bye bye.
And I thought, OK but I don't know what that is
and you need to help me with this.
So after my diagnosis I realized I
had to know what gluten was and I also
had to know where it resided in our food system.
So I wanted to tell you a little bit about what gluten is.
You may or may not know this.
Gluten is a protein-- actually it's
a combination of two proteins that
is found-- the two proteins are gliadin and glutenin.
And these two together make up the thing we call gluten.
They are found in all forms of wheat and that
includes spelt, kamut, farro, durum, emmer, and einkorn.
So I don't know if you guys have experience
what I've experienced but I often go places
and they say oh here's a gluten free thing it's spelt.
And I have to say, no that's a form of wheat.
So you have to be really careful about the lack of knowledge
on the part of the food industry.
It's also found in rye and it's found in barley.
And then it's also found in something
called triticale, which is a combination of rye and wheat.
There's a lot of question about oats,
and if you haven't been gluten free for any amount of time
you know about the concept that you
need to eat gluten free oats.
And oats themselves can be problematic for people
who can't tolerate gluten.
So there's a prolamin in oats that
mimics the prolamin in gluten, which
is called gliadin, the prolamin in oats is called avenin.
And avenin is something that people
who are gluten intolerance often are intolerant to as well.
So if you don't tolerate gluten, there is a good chance
that you actually don't tolerate avenin or oats.
If you do tolerate oats, if you're a gluten free person
you need to make sure that you buy gluten free oats.
As you may know, oats are often processed and grown with wheat
so you need to make sure that you don't
get the cross contaminated oats.
OK, so another question I get a lot is,
what are the forms of gluten intolerance, sensitivity,
allergy, there are all sorts of words
that are floating around out there.
The main thing that people seem to know about is celiac.
Celiac is an autoimmune disorder and it
is caused by-- what happens is your body-- if you're
prone to it, your body will attack itself
once you eat gluten.
How many people here are actually diagnosed celiac?
OK so we have a few folks.
There's also a non-celiac gluten intolerance.
This is where you're not celiac but you're still
reacting to gluten.
This category encompasses a few things
because they're not entirely clear what the mechanism is.
So if you're not celiac but you react to gluten
they call it non-celiac gluten intolerance or sensitivity.
Different doctors call it different things.
There's not a whole lot of information out there on this
but it's kind of just the category
that they lump people into if you're not actually celiac.
And what non-celiac gluten intolerance
is, is you are not autoimmune to gluten,
you're just reacting to it.
There's also a thing called wheat allergy,
which is a little bit different.
It is when your body mounts a histamine reaction in to wheat.
And you can actually go into anaphylaxis if you eat wheat.
It can range from mild to very strong of a reaction.
Like I said, you can go into anaphylaxis
and you can die if you have a really strong allergy.
There is no such thing really is a gluten allergy they don't
think, but there is the wheat allergy.
So that's something to keep in mind.
So I just wanted to give you a sense of who
reacts to gluten in the United States.
So you probably have heard the 1 in 133 people in the United
States they think have celiac, which is about 1%
of the population, and that's about 3 million people.
Now celiac is a genetically predetermined disease.
So you need to have the genes for celiac
in order to develop celiac.
And they think about 30% of the population,
or 94 million people in the US, have the genes for celiac.
Which is kind of intense.
And you don't necessarily develop celiac
if you have the gene.
That's the strange thing.
It needs to be triggered on some level.
So since I am celiac, we test our daughter, who is now 13,
we test her every few years for the gliadin antibodies
just to make sure she hasn't been triggered
and is now full blown celiac.
Because we don't know if you've got the gene or not,
but there's a good chance you did
Then there's another 5% of people,
which is 18+ million people who have the gluten intolerance
that's non-celiac.
And they think it's way more than that.
They think this is a very conservative estimate.
And then there's a 0.5%, which is about 1.5 million people
in the US, that a wheat allergy.
So that just gives you a sense of the amount
of people that are out there reacting to gluten.
And it's a lot.
They think these numbers are very conservative
and that we will see more and more and more
people that are statistically diagnosed with these things.
So when I was first diagnosed, I went
through a pretty huge mourning process.
I imagine this is pretty familiar to folks in this room.
I ate gluten all the time before I was diagnosed.
I had toast and cereal for breakfast,
I had sandwiches for lunch, I had pasta for dinner.
I had scones and cookies and treats throughout the day.
And all of a sudden I was told you can eat any of those things
and I was just devastated.
And I had a new baby so I didn't quite
know what to do because I was used to just making
a quick sandwich and all our friends
were dropping off meals for us.
And of course all those meals had gluten
and the hospital even sent us home
with a meal which was lasagna and I couldn't that.
So it was kind of a disaster for me.
And I've talked to a lot of people who feel the same way.
It's just very hard to get diagnosed with such a huge food
allergy or intolerance, especially
if it's something that is part of your diet all the time.
And this is very common.
Most people are diagnosed with the food intolerance or allergy
to something that they eat a lot.
That's how the body works, it gets
triggered by constant repetition.
So one thing that happened to me is
I didn't know how to eat so I just stopped eating.
So I lost all my pregnancy weight
in about three weeks, which is kind of an intense thing.
And then you've got a baby and it just
was in a very fun situation for me or my husband.
He didn't know what was happening
because he had a wife is sick all the time
and we had a new baby to deal with.
And so I just went into mourning.
I just thought well every good again
and that's just the way it is and I'm just
going to have to deal with it.
And that actually wasn't all that satisfying
but that's what I did for a little while.
Even worse was it that I had to stop baking,
or I felt like I had to stop baking.
I'm someone who's a lifelong baker.
I baked from the time I was tiny and I
could climb up onto a stool and get onto the kitchen counter
and access the cupboards in order
to get the ingredients to bake.
I mean literally I baked throughout childhood,
I baked throughout college, I baked throughout grad school.
I also baked as an adult.
And I realized through this diagnosis
actually that baking is kind of the through line to my life.
It's my passion, it's my joy, it's my stress reliever.
And so the concept that I couldn't bake anymore
was even worse than not being able to eat gluten anymore.
And I thought I couldn't bake anymore.
I realized later that I could but in the beginning
it just felt horrible.
So you go through a mourning period
where you just feel like gluten has died
and you can never talk to it again.
And then you have to pick yourself up by the bootstraps
eventually and relearn how to eat.
And I had to relearn also how to bake
and then you get on with life.
And I know in several people who tend to get stuck in the fact
that they can't eat the thing anymore.
And I just realized for me that wasn't that helpful because it
just made me feel bad all the time, emotionally bad.
So I just thought you know what?
I'm going to figure out how to eat again
and also how to bake again.
And that actually has turned into something
that's very satisfying for me.
So one thing, gluten as you may know,
comes from the Latin word for glue.
And that's a really good description of gluten
because when all else fails gluten is very sticky.
Now gluten performs a lot of functions in baking.
In fact, modern baking is based on how to manipulate gluten
to do what you want it to do.
So you take gluten away you have a really tough time actually
baking anything.
So one thing I had to do was learn what gluten did.
And what it turns out gluten performs several functions
in baking.
It's a binder, it holds things together, hence the glue name.
And a lot of gluten free things are
crumbly because they don't have the appropriate binder.
It's a structure builder.
And what I mean by that is gluten
serves as like the tent pole structure
that the starches adhere to that create a covering that then
the leaveners can work on to raise the big thing.
So if you don't have gluten, or a replacer for gluten,
you now have a very flat thing.
And I don't know about you but I have
run into a zillion gluten free baked things, like scones
and muffins, that are kind of hockey pucks.
They're very dense, they're very heavy,
and they're very crumbly.
And that is due to the binding and then the structure building
being not there.
The other thing that gluten does is it's elastic.
So it allows you to manipulate it.
So when you make a loaf of artisan bread,
you can form it on a cookie sheet
and it'll keep it-- you can stretch it to its shape,
but then you can let it stay there and it'll keep its shape.
Without gluten things don't keep their shape.
First of all, stretching it doesn't really
factor into it because you're just basically spreading it
around.
And then it just blobs out.
So I don't know if anyone's tried
to make a bread with the gluten free dough,
but it's very difficult.
You need a structure like a loaf pan in order to do that.
Then gluten also is a moisture retainer.
If helps things retain moisture.
This is why a lot of gluten free things are very dry.
I don't know if you've experienced
that but a lot of gluten free things are dry.
Like again I just think of hockey pucks,
they're flat and dry and crumbly.
And it's because there's no moisture retainer in there,
which is what gluten does.
And then gluten also extends the shelf life,
so that's related to the moisture retaining properties.
So when you bake gluten free you need to find something that
serves all of these functions, that does all of these things,
and this is the challenge for gluten free baking.
So in gluten free baking, we have
to choose what I call a gluten replacer.
And a gluten replacer is the thing
that hopefully does all of those things I talked about.
There are several that people use nowadays.
There's a thing called xanthan gum.
There's guar gum.
There's also seeds, ground seeds, psyllium, flax, chia,
there's pectin, and there's also gelatin.
There's a lot of controversy in the gluten free baking world
about which one you should use, and which one's easier to use,
and which one works the best.
And my experience has shown me that xanthan gum actually
performs most of the functions pretty well.
The one function that it doesn't perform that well,
and but none of them really do, is in the elasticity part.
It's still hard to get things that--
to mold things without them being dry.
And that's something I'm still working on.
But what all of these things are,
they fall into a class of things called hydrocolloids.
And what that means is they're moisture retainers.
So they can retain hundreds of times their own weight
in water, which is interesting.
And so each one of these things you can use in a gluten
free baking product to serve as the gluten replacer.
And what I mean is you mix this with the flours
and now you've got a thing that will mimic gluten,
a gluten flour.
Now in terms of choosing flours I
thought initially that all I needed to do
was choose a flour, add some xanthan gum,
and I'd be good to go.
That would be easy.
And it turns that it's not that straightforward.
It turns out there's no one gluten free flour that
behaves like wheat flour, which is what I wanted to mimic.
So I had to ask some questions of myself,
and I think all baker's need to ask
these questions of themselves, which is what kind of baking
do you want to do?
Do you want to do whole grain baking?
Do you wanna do grain free baking?
Do want to do paleo, which is grain free, sugar
free, sometimes dairy free.
Do you want to do healthy baking, whatever that means?
Or you want to experiment with flours?
Do you think the flours tastes good
and you want to experiment with different things.
I came down to-- what I wanted to do
was create items that were indistinguishable
from their wheat counterparts.
And this I think is what distinguishes me
from a lot of gluten free bakers in that I work on making things
that everyone is going to want to eat, gluten free and gluten
full, because they taste so good and they're
indistinguishable from the things that they normally get.
So again I thought OK, I figured this out,
now I need to figure out how to do the flours
and it turns out with gluten free baking you
need to mix flours.
No one flour will really do what you need it to do.
And so you need to mix flours in order
to mimic the performance of wheat.
And what I did was I chose a flour mix that I thought that I
liked and spent several years tweaking it to perform the way
I wanted it to perform.
So what I did was I looked at the things
that I wanted it to do.
So first of all I found that all purpose wheat flour consists
of 80 percent starches and 20 percent gums and protein, which
is kind of a weird combo.
Wheat flour does have gums in it.
And so I wanted to mimic that chemistry,
I wanted it to taste good, so I didn't
want it to taste like bean.
I don't know about you guys, but a lot of people
use bean flour and that has a very strong taste that I didn't
want to put into my baked goods.
I wanted it to have a good mouth feel,
I wanted it to be allergen free, so the mix that I came up with
doesn't have any of the common allergies.
That doesn't have soy, corn, night shades,
which are all-- nuts.
And these are all things that people in my world reacted to
and I wanted to be sure to have a mix that
didn't exclude other people in my life.
And then again I wanted things to be easy to obtain.
If it was an esoteric flour that you could only
get from a yak in Kathmandu, it wasn't helpful for anybody.
So I came up with, ta-da, Jeanne's gluten
free all purpose flour.
And the recipe for this is in my book, it's on my site.
And you can make yourself, I don't sell it as a product.
But what it has in it is brown rice flour, white rice flour,
sweet rice flour, tapioca flour, and xanthan gum.
And these are the things-- what I did is I mix this up
and then I use it cup for cup in my baking.
And I found this to be pretty satisfying.
So people ask me about recipe development,
like how do I go about doing, creating my recipes?
And one thing I found is that gluten free baking is actually
still a pretty new field.
And so it's very exciting and you can be innovative.
And what I really like is I get to investigate things
and figure out what is actually going
on with the flours and the other ingredients.
And how do I mix all of these together
to create a thing that I want to eat
and that I want to share with other people.
What I found that I like to do is
I like to start with the classics.
So I like to start with cookies and bread and cakes
and all of these things.
But I also start with classic techniques.
So I went back to basic, good classical baking.
One thing I found over the course of time
is even if you adapt the recipes,
so you take your flour in use it on some recipes
you found in another book, sometimes
you need to adjust certain ingredients.
So I found that, for example, mostly gluten free things
need a leavener, so like baking soda, baking powder, yeast.
I found that classic techniques are really helpful.
So for example beating the fat and the sugar,
so the butter and the sugar, together
to create the air pockets that allow the leavener to work.
That works really well for gluten free baking.
We've kind of forgotten that as wheat bakers.
Often I have found that my readers need extra information.
I get a lot of people who are coming
to baking never having baked before.
So when I write recipes I need to make sure
that someone who really doesn't know the kitchen very well
is able to use them and bake well.
And then I also have to be aware of other substitutions.
How many people here are not only gluten intolerance
but are intolerant to other things?
Dairy, eggs, nuts.
So, wow, that's unusual.
Usually I get a lot of folks who are also
intolerant other things.
And so in my book and my recipes I'm
always trying to give people different substitutions
for the common things.
So for the dairy and the eggs in particular.
And then often I try to make my recipes
so they don't hinge on nuts, so they
can keep the nuts in or out if they want to.
OK so I have a blog.
I don't know if anyone goes to my blog, but on my blog
it's called "Art of Gluten Free Baking" and I share recipes.
I share baking tips.
I share, I interact with my readers
and I get feedback from them about what they want.
I answer questions, and I also teach folks a little bit
about baking, how to maneuver this world
called gluten free living.
I try to make it a place that is helpful and friendly
and that people feel like they can come to and get
some information from.
And it's been really satisfying for me.
One thing that I have in my past is
I have a Ph.D. in theater history.
And so this really touches my teaching side.
I haven't been a professor for a long time,
but it's very helpful to have this venue
that I can interact with people and teach.
So I have recipe principles.
I don't know if these are interesting to people or not.
But one thing I've learned is that it's important for me
to follow a list of things that help ground me
when I'm developing recipes.
So I like to learn from the past.
And one thing I always keep in mind
is, even though everyone today, I don't know,
buys puff pastry from the supermarket,
I can't buy puff pastry.
So I have to make it myself.
And I keep realizing that a long time ago, there
was no such thing as a supermarket or the frozen food
section so they had to make everything.
So whenever something feels almost
impossible to make I think no, at one point in history
that was made by human beings and I can do that.
So there's nothing I found that I can't mimic, other
than San Francisco sourdough.
I do have a sourdough recipe on my site
but I don't have San Francisco sourdough because, as you know,
that needs a particular yeast, and on and on.
The other thing again I use classic baking techniques.
I always try to go back to the basics
if things aren't working out.
I try to think outside of the box.
This is really important because sometimes people
get stuck in doing things the way they've always been done.
So for example, I make a gluten free potato gnocchi,
you know, the little dumplings, and they were not behaving well
when I tried to boil them in water.
And after several tries I realized,
OK I need to cook these in a different way.
Now you can pan fry them and they're delicious
but I still wanted to do the water cooking.
And I realized that steaming them worked very well.
So instead of putting them all the way in the water,
I allowed the water to come to them to cook them.
So that was very helpful for me to really
to remember think outside the box.
Don't do the things you always did necessarily.
I also call pasta making humid baking.
I don't know, that's goofy.
But a lot of the same principles apply to pasta
making as applied to baking.
I'm also opened a new paradigms.
So this it straddles two worlds.
It's in classic baking but it's also its own thing.
And so you have to be open to completely new ways of doing
things.
And I found this with bread.
I don't know if any-- has anyone here made
gluten free bread before?
So one thing about gluten free bread
is that you don't really knead it
because there's no gluten to develop in it, right?
And my bread is more like a very thick cake batter.
Now a lot of people are getting stuck
on the concept of kneading their gluten free bread.
But if you can get out of that and realize
that you don't need to knead bread,
it's more of a need to mix bread,
then you have a lot more you can do with your bread.
And so that's one thing-- that's an example of I
always try to keep things in perspective in that I
need to not get stuck in old ways.
And old ways are good if they work
but if they don't work you need to move on.
And I always refine my recipes.
I mean I'm not constantly changing them
but if I find different methods or different techniques
or even different ingredients sometimes I
think OK I will refine this recipe make it even better.
And then my core idea if it's not delicious then
it's not ready.
I try not to put recipes up on my site until they're done
and until they're delicious.
And one thing, just because I lost my ability
to digest gluten, doesn't mean I lost my ability
to taste things.
And I think a lot of people forget
that about gluten free people.
So I don't settle.
I want things to be just as excellent
as they used to be for me.
So I wrote a cookbook here.
Some of you have it.
It's called "Gluten-Free Baking For The Holidays;
60 Recipes for Traditional Festive Treats."
Its for the winter holiday season so Thanksgiving,
Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year's.
It has recipes but it also includes baking tips
and it includes ingredient and equipment info.
So where to find ingredients, how to choose ingredients,
how to choose equipment and where to find it.
I really had a lot of fun writing this book.
Here's the cover.
I was very lucky, I'm with Chronicle Books
and they do just beautiful books.
And so I'm just thrilled with how my book came out.
One thing about the holiday time is
that it's a time of community and it's a time of traditions.
And I have found that one thing gluten
free people need during the holidays is
to be able to partake in the traditions
and the festivities with everybody else.
It's not that nice to go to Thanksgiving
and be served like your own little plate that
has a piece of Turkey on it, may be some steamed green beans,
and to be told, well everything else
has gluten so that's your special plate.
I want to be part of it.
I want to have the stuffing, I want to have the pie,
I want to have the cookies, I want to have the dinner rolls,
and I want to have them with everybody else.
I don't want to have my yucky old dinner roll on the side.
I want everyone to have delicious dinner rolls.
And so gluten free people feel this
need to be part of the community pretty keenly.
And so I found that as a society we
use food to bring people together,
so Thanksgiving is a really clear example,
but yeah just things like potlucks,
and PTA bake sales, and cocktail parties, and birthday parties.
We use the food in all of these things
to bring the people together.
And if you're leaving members of the community
out you're telling they're not part of the community.
And it's very important to me to bring people back in.
Food reflects and reinforces traditions,
and the holidays are full of traditions as you know.
So when I was first diagnosed in 2000 I thought,
well I'll just educate everyone about what I can eat,
and how to accommodate me, and then
everyone will be happy having Thanksgiving
without all the stuff that they are used to because they'll
include me and every one will be happy.
And I realized that's not that great of a strategy
because people want to have the things they're used
and that are traditional especially during the holidays.
And so I have altered the way I approach gluten free
living, and cooking, and sharing, and baking.
And I just want to make things that are so good nobody cares.
That includes everybody, everyone actually wants
these things, they look forward to them during the year,
and that my friends and family aren't sitting around thinking,
oh god, we got to share with Jeanne again.
So that was a guiding tenet of my book.
So my cookbook, the theory is every one--
it provides recipes for all the traditional elements
of the holidays that everyone likes and everyone wants
and that everyone can now eat because they're now
gluten free.
Going forward I am still doing a lot of development.
I'm working on more ideas.
There's a lot of uncharted territory
to cover with gluten free baking, which
I think is really interesting.
Again, it's baking but you've got
to figure it out all over again, which is fascinating to me.
And I really enjoy the challenge of it.
I have a lot more to learn.
I think everyone does.
I'm trying to work on more difficult recipes.
So things like croissants, artisan breads,
like I said some pastas, because a lot of pastas
it's hard to make them at home because
of the cooking limitations.
I'm also trying to learn more about my own intolerances.
As I get older and finding that I react not so great to dairy
and not so great to eggs.
I can still eat them, but I can't eat them
the way I used to.
So I'm trying-- even though I've always done this,
I am re-upping my commitment to looking
for excellent substitutions to give us options.
Not as the only thing but to give us options in my books
and on my site.
And then I'm always trying to listen and learn
from my readers, to listen to them and learn from them.
Because I get so much information
from my readers in terms of what's
available out there, what's not available out there,
what people want, what people like.
And so that's something I'm trying to always do.
Where to find me.
You can find me on my blog "Art of Gluten-Free Baking."
I'm also on Twitter as "Four Chickens."
My first blog was "Four Chickens"
because I have chickens in my backyard,
and it was like a knitting blog, and nobody
read it, but whatever.
So I switched it over to baking.
I'm also on Facebook as Art of Gluten free Baking
and then I have my email there.
So you can find me in many different places.
So what I would like to do is open it up
for questions from folks or comments
or ideas whatever you guys have on your minds.
AUDIENCE: I have an aunt who has been
diagnosed with celiac disease.
We think we're trying to figure out
if there's any genetic link to my sister, who is starting--
has always displayed symptoms that you mentioned.
I'm wondering do you feel first that your flour mixture is
good for pizza dough?
That's one thing that we have yet to find a good one.
JEANNE SAUVAGE: It is.
I have a recipe on my site for pizza dough
and it's actually just naturally vegan.
You don't need dairy or eggs in it,
so it works for a lot of people.
And I've also-- I have it for the regular baked
in the oven and also grilled pizza,
so if that's interesting.
AUDIENCE: Awesome.
My other question is kind of along the lines
of the beginning of your talk.
I mentioned my sister's been displaying some symptoms
and has pretty much cut it out.
And we've learned that in order to get the official diagnosis,
she actually would have to reintroduce it and go
through the hell that is bringing it back into her life.
Do you have any suggestions for somebody who's facing that?
Is it best to just cut it out and say what the heck?
Or do you suggest going through the process to really know?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: If you don't know, in order
to be diagnosed as celiac, you need
to-- it's a double diagnosis process.
You have to test positive to a blood test, the gliadin
antibodies test, and then you also
have to have a bowel biopsy.
Because one thing that the gluten is
doing if you have celiac is it's flattening
the villi in your lower intestine.
And that causes people to not absorb things.
So people who are celiac are often
anaemic, they have osteoporosis, they are more inclined
to different cancers, on top of the fact that they feel gross.
So the question is do you go through the entire process
and in order to test well, to do accurately test,
you need to be eating gluten.
Now if you figured out gluten makes you feel gross,
and you stop eating gluten, and then a while later someone says
oh would you like to test for that?
You say yes and they say, oh by the way
you need to do three weeks of eating whole wheat bread.
Now for me that wasn't an option.
So here's the deal.
When I was tested-- and this may be helpful for your sister--
I tested positive to the blood tests.
And there are very few false positives for celiac.
There are a lot of false negatives,
but there are very few false negatives.
And then the next step was I needed
to undergo the bowel biopsy and I declined the bowel biopsy.
First of all, the test was positive, that was fine.
But even more important, I didn't react well to gluten.
I felt horrible when I ate gluten.
So my answer is it depends on if your sister will avoid gluten
if a doctor doesn't tell her to do so.
Does that make sense?
So some people won't go off of gluten
even though they feel horrible every single time they eat it.
But they will not go off gluten often
if they are not given a diagnosis with these tests.
So do you think your sister would officially
go off of it if she didn't have the test?
Then I would say no, she knows the deal.
You have it, you were diagnosed with it?
No.
Who was diagnosed?
Nobody was?
AUDIENCE: My aunt.
JEANNE SAUVAGE: Oh your aunt, OK.
So there is a huge percentage rise.
So if you have a close family member
who has been diagnosed with celiac,
there is some huge percentage of increased possibility
that you will be diagnosed with gluten intolerance.
So that's why we always test our daughter.
Because right now she's not showing any symptoms of celiac
but you want to be sure that she never does.
One thing I want to clarify is I technically,
I guess in some medical circles, am not
celiac because I didn't undergo the bowel biopsy,
which is interesting.
So I tell people most of the time
that I'm gluten intolerance.
But I did test positive to the blood test
but I declined the biopsy, which is a thing.
Now on top of it, I think I shared--
I don't know if I shared with you-- about four years ago,
I was diagnosed with a wheat allergy,
and I am anaphylaxis to wheat.
So it doesn't really matter if I'm celiac
or not because if I eat wheat I can die.
The last time accidentally ate it I landed in the hospital
because I was undergoing anaphylaxis
and I had to get there quickly in order to be able to breathe.
So that's a long answer to the thing.
I don't know that other people, but I
feel like if I feel gross when I eat something
I don't eat it anymore.
But our society really isn't built like that.
I know so many people who continue
to eat the thing that makes them feel bad because they're so
used to it and they like it.
Or I have a friend that says, well
gluten makes me feel bad so I only
eat it on special occasions.
And I think so you go to the party
and you eat it and you feel gross?
That doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
Like for them that's a fun time.
For me, that's not a fun time.
But our society has such strong connections to food
that have nothing to do with what it does to our bodies
that people will do stuff like this.
And this may even sound familiar to you or the people
in your life.
AUDIENCE: Just another question about using your mix.
Do you use it for thickening, like in soups or things
like that?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: I do.
AUDIENCE: Any modifications you would make to it?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: No, huh-uh.
I use it tablespoon for tablespoon
and I use it for roux, I use it for the chenille,
I use it for gravy.
So use it for all sorts of things.
It seems to work really well for all of those things.
I make a New Orleans gumbo and I make the roux first
and it performs beautifully.
It turns that nice chocolate brown and it's really nice.
So yeah.
AUDIENCE: Super.
Have you have tried some of the other baking mixes that
are flour mixes that are out there
and do anything to compare?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: You know, I have.
I highly recommend the King Arthur mix.
I don't know if anyone's used that one.
That's a nice one.
It's pretty reasonable, it has many
of the same ingredients that my mix says.
I'm not sure if it have xanthan gum
so if it doesn't have xanthan gum be
sure to add about a quarter teaspoon per cup
for your regular baking.
Not for yeast breads, that's a whole different thing,
but for regular baking.
We were talking earlier about cup
for cup, which is the one that Thomas Keller has developed.
I think you can buy it in Williams Sonoma.
And cup for cup I don't recommend.
First of all I haven't used it so I can't tell you how
if I like how it works.
But it's got milk powder in it and so
many people I know who are gluten intolerant
also don't do that well with dairy
so I figure why even add that into the situation.
AUDIENCE: It sounds like you have a lot of great recipes
that aren't just baking.
Are you going to write another cookbook with your pizza
and gnocchi and other great things?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: You know, I hope to.
That is something that's in the works.
So yeah, I hope to do that.
And I have all of these things on my site as well.
So I've got the pizza on my site,
I've got puff pastry on my site, I've
got pasta dough on my site.
And I guess the end, there you go.
But yeah, I have a ton of stuff on my site
that are-- it's all free.
And I also answer questions so people often
will write me and say, this is my family's special recipe
for German coffee cake and would you be willing to adapt it?
And if I have the time and I want to I
will do that for folks.
I mean if I become super duper popular
I don't know how much I can do that.
But that's part of what I-- Earlier this year I
wanted to define for myself what my goal was with all of this.
I mean my first goal, of course, was for me.
I wanted to be able to eat these things.
But my second goal is to serve people,
to help folks be able to eat again.
And to be able to bake again and be able to enjoy this again.
And so I wanna really continue that,
and that's why I try to be as successful as I
can on social media and on my site.
Because I really want to help out folks.
AUDIENCE: More of a curiosity, I noticed
that in your recipe for the flour, one of the ingredients
is glutenous rice flour, which I assume does not have gluten.
JEANNE SAUVAGE: No.
AUDIENCE: But is it just a lot of starch, or what makes it
glutenous?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: Yeah it has a lot of starch.
It's also known as sticky rice flour and the glutenous part,
as you picked up, it just means it's sticky.
It's called sweet rice flour most of the time.
You can buy it in the supermarket
often in the ethics section in a little white box that's
labeled mochiko.
And it's used a lot in Asian baking.
But it is confusing.
I get tons of questions about, you're gluten free
and you use glutenous rice flour and so I
have to explain that the rice is not a gluten containing grain.
So it's just a weird thing, I don't know why.
But it actually is a really good part of the mix.
In addition to the xanthan gun, it helps bring things together,
which I think is nice.
Another thing, just talking about my mix,
I recommend to folks so you see this in my book
and I have it on my site but I recommend
that if you are sensitive to graininess--
this is one of the issues that often happens
with gluten free flour, always look
for the finely ground flours.
So like there's extra fine grind brown rice
flour that you can find.
Now if you can't find it and you're just using brown rice
flour-- like I use the flours from Bob's Red Mill,
I use flours from Authentic Foods.
Authentic Foods has the extra fine grind but Bob's doesn't.
And if it bothers you enough you can just
stick it in your blender or your food processor
and grind it up a little more and make it a little more fine.
So that works too.
The one I would not recommend in terms of the mix,
you asked about mix, the Bob's Red Mill Mix, is not so good.
Do you guys have Bob's Red Mill here?
Yeah OK.
It has a lot of bean flour in it.
And it's just very strong tasting.
And I don't know why they keep having it.
But when you make things-- so part of when I bake,
like I bake cookies.
I eat some of cookie dough, that's
just kind of part of what I do.
You cannot do that when there's a bean flour involved
because it's so strong and it's so yucky, basically.
That's why I recommend stay away from the bean flours.
Also the bean flours are very high in protein
and they go rancid very quickly.
So you need to store those in the freezer usually.
And I have that in my book and on my site but something
to keep in mind.
Did that answer your question about the glutenous rice?
So more questions?
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned you have
people ask you to adapt lots of recipes.
When you're doing that adaptation,
what would you say is the most common change you're making?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: Well the flour, of course.
The other, probably the two most common changes I make
is in terms of the leaveners.
So often things don't have enough leavening.
And when I say leavener, I mean the thing that makes it rise,
so baking powder, baking soda, yeast.
So most gluten free recipes I found need more of those things
often.
Now using classic baking techniques
actually sometimes makes it so you
don't have to because you're creating the air
pockets that the leaveners can work on.
For example, you beat the fat and the sugar together.
So it's the leaveners that I often do.
Sometimes eggs.
I find that there's not enough eggs
in baking to create the moisture and also
to create some of the structure.
And then with yeast, you need to have much more yeast
than you would normally have.
Those are probably the most common changes that I make.
And the other thing is gluten free things seem
to take a little bit longer to cook, to bake.
So I often either increase the temperature or at least
I increase the time.
And I think part of that is-- Do you guys know
the concept of hydration?
So in baking parlance the hydration of a dough
is the percentage of the water or liquid in a dough.
And I have found that gluten free things
do well with more liquid in it, more water,
because they dry out much more quickly.
And I think that then leads to a longer baking time
because you need to bake some of that out.
Is that helpful?
There's one thing that's hard, is
I try to tell people, for example
if you have a cookie recipe and you
want to adapt it, I just tell people use my mix.
Use the cup for cup for the wheat flour in your recipe,
see what happens.
And for something like a cookie that usually suffices.
Then you get a little more complicated,
you get into muffins and scones.
Sometimes you need tweaks, sometimes you don't.
Get into cakes, that's more complicated.
But I always tell people to try and see what happens.
And then once they see what happens,
if it's not to their liking they can kind of
reverse engineer what happened.
So was it too dry?
OK it's too dry, add more eggs or add more liquid.
Didn't rise.
OK did you beat the eggs, the fat, and the sugar?
Yes.
OK you need more leavener.
Did it come out kind of wet after you've baked it?
Yes.
OK you need to raise baking temperature.
You need to put it in longer.
So I think I ultimately would like to get to the point
where I can teach people to do this themselves.
But each recipe seems to be its own bird.
And so, so far I haven't been able to say,
for all muffins you need to make this adaptation, that kind
of thing.
So that's what makes it complicated.
But I tell people to try and see what happens.
But one thing you can't adapt cup for cup at all
is a yeasted recipe.
Yeasted recipes are their whole other bird.
You need more yeast, you need more liquid,
often you need more eggs, you need more time.
And so when people tried to do, for example,
they try to do their moms bread with my flour
mixture it doesn't work so well.
Because there's so many different variables
that go into a yeasted thing.
So that's a challenge.
Although like I said I do have a sourdough
on my site, which is fun because you develop your own sourdough
starter.
And then from there you make the bread
which is a fun-- if you like that kind of thing--
it's a fun process.
And I harvest the wild yeast.
I don't use commercial yeast, I harvest wild yeast
and I show you how to do that.
So that's kind of fun.
AUDIENCE: So a lot of the gluten free baking
I do is for somebody who is also rice intolerant
and I encounter that a lot in the recipes in your--
JEANNE SAUVAGE: Right.
AUDIENCE: --mix.
So any suggestions for direction to go
if rice flour is not really an option?
JEANNE SAUVAGE: Yes.
In my book, if you've got the book I've got,
some substitutions-- like for, with for the--
so I don't think I can remember all of them.
I have it on my site but I think it's for the-- now this
will alter my mix and things will behave and taste
a little different.
But for the brown rice flour it'll
tell you substitute sorghum.
For the white rice flour, tell you just substitute millet
flour.
For the sweet rice flour, I tell you to substitute potato flour.
For the tapioca flour you substitute potato starch,
two different things.
And then you use the xanthan gum.
So you're going to have a different tasting mix,
it's going to be a little more flavorful because millet
and sorghum taste has a taste.
Also you may want to grind the sorghum cause
sorghum tends to be kinda gritty.
And the millet too, kind of depends.
Also be aware that the starch is weirdly enough-- even
tapioca starch will go bad-- way quicker than you think they do.
And I don't really understand why.
A lot of people tell me they don't like tapioca starch.
Now the weird thing, tapioca starch and tapioca flour,
same thing.
Potato starch and potato flour, not the same thing.
So it's really complicated.
But what I found is starches tend
to go very rancid very quickly.
And people would tell me they don't like tapioca flour often
its they don't like rancid tapioca flour.
If it tastes metallic and disgusting, it's gone bad.
I think what I want to tell you is if the potato starch is
tasting funky, then to switch that out.
So any of these flours, if you're not using them quickly,
I recommend you store them in the fridge
or you store them in the freezer just
to make your not running into the going bad thing.
I had a fabulous photographer and she made things-- well they
look like this-- but she also just
brought out how good they taste.
So I am quite lucky to have her.
I really enjoyed the whole process of writing this book.
It was fun and delicious.
I spend most of 2011 in Christmas land,
which is not a bad place to be really.
One thing I have in my book, just as a little teaser,
I've got fortune cookies in the book.
So if you're gluten free and you haven't
had a fortune cookie in a long time,
you can have fortune cookies.
That's always fun.
I have fruitcake, plum pudding, pies, dinner rolls, cookies.
So thank you very much for having me.
It's been an honor and it's been a lot of fun.
I appreciate it.