Georgia McDermott - Intolerance-Friendly Kitchen

Dependable, delicious recipes that make great food accessible for a range of intolerances: gluten free, FODMAP friendly and more.

If you have a dietary intolerance and sometimes feel youre missing out on foods youd love to eat, this book is for you.

Intolerance-Friendly Kitchen is all about reliable recipes that are gluten free, low FODMAP and vegetarian, and cater wherever possible to diets without dairy, eggs, nuts, grains, high-starch flours or gums.

Georgia McDermott also known as much-loved Melbourne food blogger @georgeats is passionate about making lifes delicious moments accessible to everyone, and shes done all the painstaking recipe testing so you dont have to. Whether its knowing the best flour to use for a certain cake or pastry, or offering a substitution to cut the lactose but keep the flavour, Georgia has worked out how to get the best results every time. Her 100+ beautifully photographed recipes include:

Yeasted croissants | Chocolate babka | Any-flour-you-like brownie cookies | Sourdough cinnamon scrolls | Vegetarian or vegan sausage rolls | Starch-free sourdough | Egg pasta | Tofu and ginger dumplings

From bread, cakes and other sweet bakes to pasta, noodles and savoury pastry, this is a collection of recipes so rewarding and easy to follow that meeting your dietary requirements feels like a bonus!

It can often feel like food intolerances and a love of good food are mutually exclusive. Garlic, onion and wheat are arguably the defining pillars of cooking, after all. Id wager a bet that theyre in about 90% of the recipes in cookbooks and on the internet. So what do you eat when youre left without them?

I stood at this precipice seven or so years ago when I finally acquiesced to a doctors suggestion to try the FODMAP diet. I had been eating a gluten-free, low-dairy and low-fructose diet to manage a series of debilitating symptoms, but was reluctant to go all the way. I had (and still have) gastroparesis, long-term small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) and a host of other digestive ailments. They were (and still are) impacting my life on a daily basis. It was finally time to do something serious about it.

I have always been fascinated by the science of why a recipe works, so I took quite quickly to experimenting with gluten-free, FODMAP-friendly flours. I went so far as to document my earnest (and oft unappealing) creations on a secret account I had on a small but growing app called Instagram.

Gluten-free baking has burgeoned from relative obscurity since I began posting photos of unique-looking baked goods way back when. A constant in the evolution, however, has been the idea that you need to combine as many gluten-free flours and starches as you can to create an edible result. Whats more? Youll need gums. Lots of them. Without gluten, starches and gums are heralded as the two ingredients that can hold things together and replicate wheat as best as possible. The catch? Neither ingredient is known for being particularly friendly towards or helpful for digestive systems in distress.

Im not a dietician, a doctor or a nutritionist. These recipes are not superfood packed, low sugar or low fat. They are classic sweet and savoury baking basics, made as FODMAP friendly, digestive-system friendly and inclusive as possible for all of us on the dietary fringe. Like having water in between wines, these recipes are responsible fun for those with food intolerances and digestive issues: the cakes and baked goods youve missed, without the starches and gums you (often) dont need.

A life of bland, boring food seems to be the foregone conclusion when considering a life without onion, garlic and wheat, but after nearly a decade of dealing with my own food intolerances and digestive illness, I want you to know that this is not the case. I hope this book shows you that with a little creativity, good food and dietary intolerances can go hand in hand.

Happy baking,

George

GENERAL

SINGLE FLOUR

Single-flour recipes do what they say on the tin: they use a single flour. Although weve been led to believe that gluten-free baking requires a minimum of 4.7 different flours per recipe, that isnt always the case. The benefit of a single-flour recipe is namely the ease of it. Its quick, straightforward and you need naught but a single flour! The caveat here, though, is that said single flour should be the best quality you can find, as a stale and gritty variety has nowhere to hide, and you will be able to taste it in your bake.

CREAMING BUTTER AND SUGAR

Creaming butter and sugar is the act of beating soft, room-temperature butter and sugar together at a high speed until they become light in colour and texture. This is a critical baking technique as you beat, youre creating tiny little air bubbles within the mixture, aerating the ingredients as you go. These air bubbles will provide lift and lightness to your cake or cookies. Failure to cream butter correctly can result in a sunken, dense, oily or otherwise generally unpleasant result.

Although recipes often specify that creaming takes 23 minutes, I find this heavily dependent on the season. In summer? Sure, creaming might only take 3 minutes. In winter, however, it can take as long as 20 minutes, maybe more. My advice is to go by sight and texture, rather than time. The mixture should be a very pale yellow, almost white. It should feel light and fluffy, not dense. My preferred way of telling when butter and sugar are well creamed is scraping down the bowl of my stand mixer with a spatula. If I meet any resistance from firm butter or I struggle to scrape the sides or bottom, I know the mixture isnt fully creamed. If I meet no resistance and can slide the spatula around and through the fluffy mixture with absolute ease, I know its done.

STEAM BAKING

Steam baking is a helpful tool in the arsenal of a gluten-free baker. It sounds more complicated than it is: all it involves is adding a small oven-proof container of boiling water to your oven 10 minutes before baking. This creates a steamy environment that encourages lift and rise in baked goods. It is particularly helpful when baking bread, either sourdough or yeasted.

It is also a really helpful tool for extending the freshness of your gluten-free baked goods. If youve ever eaten anything gluten free, youll know it can become rock hard very, very easily. Reheating stale goods in a steamy environment (a steamy oven or a microwave) gives them an injection of moisture that restores them to their former glory.

TENTING

A few recipes in this book suggest tenting a baked good with foil to prevent overbrowning. This is just using a piece of foil to create a little tent for the dish as it bakes. Elevating the top of the foil (like a tent) means that it wont adhere to the top of the baked good and damage the surface. Loosely tenting allows airflow underneath the foil, which will prevent condensation and promote even cooking.