Ina Garten's Secret Weapon For Gluten-Free Chocolate Cake

If you're going to be a dinner guest in someone's home, celebrated chef, author, and TV personality Ina Garten would certainly be an exciting person to get an invitation from. If you're gluten-free or otherwise diet restricted, you are definitely in good hands in the Barefoot Contessa's house, where she tailors the entire meal — from appetizer to dessert — to accommodate her guests' varied dietary needs and preferences, with the end goal being that everyone present can enjoy each dish on the table. If a non gluten chum is among the attendees, Garten might just make her Decadent (Gluten-Free) Chocolate Cake recipe, which features the star's secret weapon for gluten-free baking: a one-for-one gluten-free flour.

A one-for-one blend, as the name implies, is created to be a direct substitute for regular flour in any recipe, requiring no adjustments to the ingredient amounts but serving as a perfect swap for the called-for quantity — one cup of gluten-free flour per every cup of ordinary flour. Garten uses Chef Thomas Keller's Cup4Cup gluten-free flour, which the restauranteur developed to accommodate many requests from the gluten-free patrons in his renowned restaurants. Keller's mixture is composed of a rice flour blend (consisting of both white and brown rice flours), cornstarch, tapioca flour, potato starch, and xanthan gum.

"I put (Cup4Cup) to the test and found it to be extraordinary in everything I tried," Garten stated in a Facebook post accompanying her recipe for Gluten-Free Chocolate Chunk Cookies. In terms of her chocolate cake, the celeb chef said no one would ever have a clue the luscious dessert they enjoyed at her dinner table contained gluten-free flour.

Cup4Cup is one of a host of one-for-one flours that are available on the market these days, utilizing various gluten-free components to form a blend that mimics ordinary wheat-based flour. In addition to the elements in Keller's mixture, other popular products incorporate ingredients like potato starch, sorghum flour, and millet flour.

Most one-for-one 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 for pillowy gluten-free cakes, additionally providing elasticity and enhancing texture. While it's ideal for desserts and pastries, like Ina Garten's chocolate cake, it's not the best binder for breads — psyllium husks are better for that job. To give gluten-free baked goods a needed lift in the absence of gluten and its functions, carbonated water is also a useful cheat code for gluten-free bread as well as other GF bakery items, adding air bubbles for enhanced rise and volume.

Like Thomas Keller, Garten began looking into gluten-free recipe swaps in response to receiving many queries from fans. While 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 dietary preferences as an annoyance, I see them as a challenge," she stated on her website.