Help me deglutinate this pumpkin bread

October 31, 2022 8:13 AM

I love the Smitten Kitchen pumpkin bread and it might be a nice thing to bring to Thanksgiving. My brother-in-law has celiac. I am not a skilled baker or cook (hence why I love this recipe) and don't really know how alternate flours will affect this bake or how to choose one. Can you help me make this bread safe?

I think it's generally understood among right-thinking people that Smitten Kitchen's recipe is the best pumpkin bread recipe. It uses one bowl, it takes exactly one playthrough of Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher to make, it's relatively foolproof (I recently got teaspoons and tablespoons confused and put in way too much baking soda and it was still good), it makes your house smell magical, it's extremely delicious obviously. Despite not being a confident baker I feel like maybe I can up the difficulty one notch by using an alternate flour and still come out with something good.

That said, I don't know anything about GF baking. In this specific recipe, would I just do a 1:1 replacement? What flour would work best? Are there other adjustments I should make? Brother-in-law doesn't have any other food sensitivities that I'm aware of.

posted by babelfish to Food & Drink (13 answers total)

Just a note before you go to the trouble of doing the subbing: If your BIL has celiac (and not just gluten intolerance) I would check first that he will eat this even if you make the necessary substitutes. Many people with celiac disease worry about cross contamination & won't eat food you cooked in the same oven, pans, counter space etc where gluten is normally used. The celiac member of our family has special requirements like this. Of course YMMV but worth checking!
posted by lesser whistling duck at 8:20 AM on October 31, 2022 [30 favorites]

According to my understanding, Bob's Red Mill All-Purpose Gluten Free flour can indeed be used in a 1:1 replacement for regular flour in most recipes. This web site also suggests adding a teaspoon of xanthan gum (which you can get right next to the Bob's Red Mill stuff, Bob's stuff is like the King of Gluten Free Baking).

You may want to do a test batch first to see how it turns out. The biggest difference is a textural one - your recipe may be slightly drier and crumblier, but that would be the only difference, and can be easily corrected with "okay, I'll maybe add a teaspoon more water" or something. Or you could try it and decide that even though it is a TEEEEEEENY bit drier, you don't care.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:20 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, if you decide you don't want to deal with the conversion, King Arthur brand flours make some very decent gluten-free boxed cake mixes, including a pumpkin bread mix. You could just use their mix and then give it the same cinnamon-sugar-on-top treatment as the Smitten Kitchen recipe does.

(If their boxed chocolate gluten-free mix was good enough to turn up at the bake sale I was running, it's good enough for a family Thanksgiving.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:25 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I made this recipe last week with Bob’s Red Mill 1:1 gluten free baking flour (the blue bag, not the red one), and it turned out great. The all-purpose flour linked above has a distinct savory chickpea taste to me and is drier than the baking-specific formulation, so I like the blue package much better for sweet quickbreads like this one.
posted by Spinneret at 8:25 AM on October 31, 2022 [10 favorites]

Response by poster: Oh yeah I meant to add, he is almost certainly too lax about stuff like cross-contamination, so we don't need to worry about things like the bowl or loaf tin (although tbh at the moment I am using foil loaf tins because I don't have a regular one). He will for instance toast his GF bagel in the same toaster we've used for our regular bagels, which would give my celiac coworker a heart attack. He was diagnosed relatively late and is also just an incredibly easygoing person and I'm not sure which is at play here but the man is nearly 50 years old and I am not gonna tell him how to live his life!
posted by babelfish at 8:26 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

There are multiple Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free flours and I would NOT recommend the one EmpressCallipygos mentions for pumpkin bread - it's garbanzo-bean based and can have kind of a beany flavor. I would instead recommend using their Gluten-Free One-to-One which you really can use cup for cup in quick bread and cookie recipes (yeast-leavened bread is dicier). King Arthur also has a nice replacement flour: Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour.

You can nerd out about GF flours and use special blends for every recipe but these two are solid and reliable replacements for wheat flour in recipes that don't depend heavily on gluten. These are pretty widely available in US supermarkets; I'm sure there are good products available elsewhere but I wouldn't know what to recommend.
posted by mskyle at 8:27 AM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, check with your BIL about whether he'd be comfortable eating something made in a non-gluten-free kitchen.

Then use ctrl+F to find references to "gluten" in the comments at the bottom of your Smitten Kitchen link, if you haven't already - those include lots of reports of success with a 1-to-1 substitution of gluten-free flour blend for the flour in the recipe, and many of those reports include the brand name of the blend the happy pumpkin-loaf bakers used.
posted by Hellgirl at 8:29 AM on October 31, 2022

King Arthur has a 1:1 brand called Measure for Measure which will work great in this recipe.

As a general hint: if you're baking something that is cake or cake-like or cookie like and doesn't need the chewiness from gluten, you can just use a 1:1 gf flour and you're good to go.
Pumpkin bread is not bread. It's cake.
posted by plinth at 8:59 AM on October 31, 2022 [6 favorites]

Best answer: I'm a baking maniac who went GF about 18 months ago. And pumpkin bread is one of my favorite things in the world. I haven't made the SK recipe yet, but for anything I'm making GF in the bread or cake families, I now whip about twice as long after you add the eggs. GF baked goods tend to fail at the crumb and lift level, so whipping a little extra after you add the eggs can help with the rise and therefore the crumb. Plus pumpkin bread is dense by nature, so a little lift from the whipped eggs makes a difference.
posted by cocoagirl at 9:28 AM on October 31, 2022 [9 favorites]

One summer I made many loaves of zucchini bread for a group including gluten free people (though no one with celiac). A mix of 75% brown rice flour and 25% white rice flour was recommended by one of them and seemed to go over pretty well. And since most of these quick bread recipes use 1 1/2 cups of flour for a loaf it's easy to measure.

I imagine it would work equally well with pumpkin or banana bread.
posted by sevenless at 9:29 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

Seconding cocoagirl about the whipping/eggs thing! Since going GF over a decade ago I've gotten a lot of mileage out of beating the daylights out of just about anything cakelike. There's no gluten to over-develop, and you get that extra lift as mentioned.

For a cake 1:1 flours are really successful in my experience, though as everyone's already said the Bob's red bag stuff is too beany for most applications. The denser the cake, IMO, the more leeway you have for flours -- so pumpkin bread is one of the cakes that do fine even with just plain rice flour (brownies are like this too, and are one of the things that benefit immensely from eternal beating).
posted by cabbage raccoon at 11:15 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Celiac here! I have had much better luck with the King Arthur over Bob's, especially for sweet items - Bob's can be a little bitter and grainy. This is my favorite for regular recipes. Also a nice run down on the different flours.
posted by suviko at 1:04 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nthing Bob’s Red Mill 1:1 in the blue package - I have been making this recipe with this substitution very successfully for a few years now. Makes good loaves, good muffins, is simply the best.
posted by annathea at 8:47 PM on October 31, 2022