Ina Garten’s secret weapon for gluten-free chocolate cake

If you’re going to be invited to someone’s house for dinner, celebrity chef, author, and TV personality Ina Garten would definitely be an exciting person to receive an invitation from. If you’re gluten-free or on a restricted diet, you’re definitely in good hands in Barefoot Contessa’s home, where she tailors the entire meal – from starter to dessert – to meet the varying needs and food preferences of its guests, with the end goal being that everyone present can taste each dish presented on the table. If a gluten-free friend is in attendance, Garten might just whip up her decadent (gluten-free) chocolate cake recipe, which features the star’s secret weapon for gluten-free baking: one-for-one gluten-free flour.

A one-for-one mix, as the name suggests, is created as a direct replacement for regular flour in any recipe, requiring no adjustment to ingredient quantities but serving as a perfect swap for the amount called for – one cup of gluten-free flour for every cup of regular flour. Garten uses chef Thomas Keller’s Cup4Cup gluten-free flour, which the restaurateur developed to meet the many requests from gluten-free customers at his renowned restaurants. Keller’s blend is made from a blend of rice flour (made up of white and brown rice flours), cornstarch, tapioca flour, potato starch, and xanthan gum.

“I put (Cup4Cup) to the test and found it to be amazing in everything I tried,” Garten said in a Facebook post accompanying her recipe for free chocolate chunk cookies. gluten. When it comes to her chocolate cake, the celebrity chef said no one would ever have a clue that the delicious dessert they enjoyed at her table contained gluten-free flour.

Read more: 19 Tips You Need to Make Better Muffins

Other one-for-one gluten-free flour options

Cup4Cup is one of a multitude of individual flours available on the market today, using various gluten-free components to form a blend that mimics regular wheat flour. In addition to the items in Keller’s mix, other popular products contain ingredients such as potato starch, sorghum flour, and millet flour.

Most gluten-free flour blends contain xanthan gum, which serves the important function of acting as a binder in place of gluten. Xanthan gum is a key ingredient in moist gluten-free cakes, additionally providing elasticity and improving texture. While it’s great for desserts and baked goods, like Ina Garten’s chocolate cake, it’s not the best binder for bread: psyllium husks are better for this job. To give gluten-free baked goods the needed boost in the absence of gluten and its functions, sparkling water is also a useful cheat code for gluten-free bread as well as other GF baked goods, adding air bubbles for improved rise and volume.

Like Thomas Keller, Garten began investigating gluten-free recipe swaps in response to numerous questions from her fans. Although the Barefoot Contessa isn’t gluten-free herself, she’s happy to find alternatives when cooking for friends who are. “Instead of seeing allergies or food preferences as a nuisance, I see them as a challenge,” she said on her website.

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Read the original article on Food Republic.