There are very few allergen-free cookbooks, and The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook is the only allergen free baking book I know about.  The author of this cookbook is Cybele Pascal, the mother of two food allergic sons.  Because of the many food allergies in her family she set out to exclude all of the 7 major allergens (dairy, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish) from her cookbook, which is obviously very tough to accomplish when you are baking.

When I flipped through this book at the bookstore I was impressed by both the number of recipes and the beautiful pictures.  The food in the photos actually looks like the real thing, I hoped the taste could measure up.  The recipes in this cookbook all use a flour blend which is a combination of superfine brown rice flour, tapioca starch, and potato starch.   The superfine brown rice flour is pretty pricey, I think the bag I bought was about $12 for a 3 lb bag.  At first I thought baking things out of this book would be prohibitively expensive, but I have made 4 of the recipes now and still have flour leftover.

The first recipe we made were the chocolate chip cookies.  I’ve made two other gluten free vegan chocolate chip cookie recipes and this beat both hands down.  I thought brown rice flour would be gritty but because of the superfine consistency of this flour it was not much more so than normal flour.  We then let my two year old pick out the next cookies to try and he wanted to try the chocolate sandwich cookies, which look like Oreo knockoffs.  This recipe was slightly more complicated since it required baking the cookie part and letting them cool and then making the frosting as well.  I was even more impressed with these.  They actually taste fairly similar to Oreo cookies, the chocolate cookie is crunchy and the creamy frosting is not too far off from the frosting in real Oreos.

The last recipe we tried really blew my socks off.  We had the baking powder biscuits, and I thought that there was really no way they were going to be as good as the previous two recipes.   They smelled like real biscuits coming out of the oven, and we served them warm with our meal.  My husband and I nearly forgot they were allergy free.  They taste just like homestyle biscuits you’d use for biscuits and gravy.  I have no idea how Cybele Pascal was able to recreate this taste but I’m pretty sure at that point we declared that she was a genius!

I definitely have no patience for baking experiments and when I’ve tried things and failed I get very frustrated.  That is why I am so thankful for people like Cybele Pascal who have spent the time and energy and who have the know how to create recipes like this for food allergic families.  My son didn’t even know what biscuits were until we made them that night.  We have a long list of other recipes we want to try from her cookbook, and also have plans to try some of the recipes from cybelepascal.com (including allergy free donuts!).