GF pastry - for lemon tart

[Depome]

A family of four are staying with us on Wednesday, and two of them are Coeliacs. That doesn't really concern me, but I've now realised that GF pastry is a bit of a joke. I do have some Orgran plain flour left which I will use if I have to, but I was really hoping to make one up myself. I've bought a bunch of freaky flours and grains this morning so that I can make a TMX bread, but I don't have tapioca or xantham gum. It looks like these feature quite a lot in the recipes with good reviews.

What's the secret? I wouldn't have thought that gluten would play much of a role in shortcrust pastry so I'm a bit baffled by the complexity in replacing wheat flour in this instance. I can understand when it comes to sponge cakes, but this doesn't make much sense to me 

I want to make a lemon tart, so I think the almond pastries (almond meal based) will work fine with that if I resort to that, but I was wondering if anyone has a 2-3 flour GF pastry recipe.

Am I right in thinking that GF baking is about getting the right ratios of various flours, with quite different properties, to get the ideal texture for each product? Is it simply a matter of playing around with the proportions until it works? I've had gluten free periods in my life and I can recall that rice flour based biscuits are very melt-in-the-mouth, like icing sugar, and I guess you base recipe conversions around these sorts of known properties. Is that right? I'd love to be better at GF cooking because I think most of us benefit from removing wheat from our diet, and wheat is certainly the pervasive gluten agent.

Thanks for your help and/or tips

[I Love Bimby!]

Hi Depome,

I haven't tried a Gluten Free Pastry recipe before. Just did a quick google search and i looks like you'll need to treat it a bit differently to normal pastry: http://www.google.com/search?q=recipe+gluten+free+shortcrust+pastry&rls=com.microsoft:en-au&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&rlz=1I7GGLL_en

You can use Gar Gar instead of Xanthum Gum (it acts as a binding substance).

Tapioca to my understanding is the same as Sago. If you need Tapioca Powder/Flour just grin the Sago.

Hope that helps sum. Brazen's blog http://brazen20au.blogspot.com/2009/05/gluten-free.html also has some great GF ideas.

[LisaR12]

Hi Debs

I watched a cook and chef episode ( Maggie Beer) and apparently this one proved very tasty and popular

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/cookandchef/txt/s1668510.htm


( did you know if all else fails you can buy ready made gluten free pastry)
Lisa

[bron]

Depome, I have a GF Recipe for pastry in my Spanish book, its made with Proceli flour, I have seen it made at a demo too, it was fab!
250g Proceli flour
100g butter(room temp)
100g water
1 tspn GF baking powder
pinch of salt and sugar

Easy peasy! Place all ingredients in this order. 15 seconds speed 6. Voilá!

[brazen20au]

sorry, i havne't made pastry! it's in teh too hard basket

[Depome]

I think it's going in my too hard basket too. I've never heard of proceli flour, nor seen it for sale. I did find the breakdown of it on here yesterday (Brazen's I think) but still none the wiser. The grocer that I use for this stuff has tonnes of weird products too but I've never seen porceli. Might have to use the Orgran if it is suitable after all. Pretty sure there's mini pie pictures on the box so should be ok.

[brazen20au]

i've actually seen proceli flour in one of the health food stores here in canberra, which surprised me!

i bought some pastry from coles recently but haven't used it yet (at $3+ per sheet i'm too scared lol)

[Depome]

I cracked and bought xanthun gum and tapioca (sago). I've just made the pastry in LisaR12's link, and baked the filling now too. I can't report back yet as I haven't eaten it. It got baked for over an hour because the filling didn't set in the 35-40 mins that the recipe said. Consequently the pastry case has split, but only in the last ten mins of cooking. I didn't bother chilling it because I'm too lazy, but I was able to push the pastry into place after rolling the main part of it. I will post the TMX recipe later in the week.

[Thermomixer]

Sorry Depome - just getting around to checking threads.

I would just buy gluten-free flour mix and make as per normal instructions for shortcrust pastry ?  Maybe I'm wrong, but the thing that you don't want to do with pastry is use flour high in gluten and overwork it.  So the gluten-free flours should make a good pastry.

I think Proceli is a brand of GF flour.

There is a pecan tart recipe in the Gf cooking book from Thermomix that has 130g rice -made into flour, 25g sugar, 35g GF cornflour, 20g soy or chestnut flour, 80g butter and 60g cold water - basically mill rice until a flour, add sugar and mill some more then all EXCEPT water and mix on speed 4 until breadcrumb-like mix then add water 1 Tbsp at a time on speed 3 till it forms a dough.

[LisaR12]

so debs/depome

how did the pastry turn out?

Lisa

[Depome]

It was pretty good Lisa. Just wish I'd milled the rice for a little longer, but was nice to have a bit of texture in the pastry too. I forgot to add the caster sugar to it, so I sprinkled it over the pastry before baking 

The pastry - didn't bother weighing it down to blind bake and it wasn't a problem. I pierced the odd hole in it as it was baking and it was fine.


The lemon tart. Pastry did come away from the sides a bit. Refrigerating for a good half an hour in the flan pan/tin is supposed to eliminate this but I cut that time short too  

[I Love Bimby!]

There is a pecan tart recipe in the Gf cooking book from Thermomix that has 130g rice -made into flour, 25g sugar, 35g GF cornflour, 20g soy or chestnut flour, 80g butter and 60g cold water - basically mill rice until a flour, add sugar and mill some more then all EXCEPT water and mix on speed 4 until breadcrumb-like mix then add water 1 Tbsp at a time on speed 3 till it forms a dough.

Thanks Thermomixer - I'd missed this one  . Did a quick search for "Pastry" in the GF book but came up with nothing. Didn't think to read through all the contents though 

[Thermomixer]

That's a problem with the index ILB

GREAT tart Depome - really kicking goals 

[Depome]

Thanks Mr T.

P.S. I think the index is far from comprehensive too, and quite illogical at times.