Gluten-free recipes for all bakers

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Our cookbook of the week is Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple: A New Way to Bake Gluten-Free by Aran Goyoaga. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Double chocolate fennel-buckwheat crinkle cookies; glazed lemon, yogurt and olive oil pound cake; and fig, honey and lemon tea cakes.

Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple falls into a “free-from” category of cookbooks. But after one bite of author Aran Goyoaga’s double chocolate fennel-buckwheat crinkle cookies — crisp on the outside, yielding on the inside — or luscious, lemony pound cake, you don’t feel as if you’re missing out on anything at all.

This is the beauty of the fourth-generation Basque baker’s approach to gluten-free: instead of limitations, her recipes signal possibilities.

“I have to use (gluten-free) because it is the type of ingredients that I use, and somebody who’s looking for that because of their own health needs to have that as an indicator,” says the Seattle-based writer, food stylist and photographer.

“Because of my history with eating disorders (in my university years), I never wanted it to be about restriction. In fact, I wanted it to feel abundant and textural.”

Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple follows a standout baking chapter in Goyoaga’s second cookbook, Cannelle et Vanille (Sasquatch Books, 2019). Less than six months after it was published, the pandemic started. At the height of the sourdough craze, people turned to her for guidance on creating and baking with a gluten-free starter.

Gluten-free baking — especially breads involving fermentation — “is a different ballgame,” says Goyoaga. Since then, her own experimentation has continued as she’s incorporated different formulations and methods.

“You’re always introducing new things. I think that’s such a cool thing because it goes with the spirit of baking with something that’s alive. And you’re adapting and being flexible with it.”

Goyoaga’s blueprint for creating a starter, sourdough troubleshooting tips, baking and dessert chapters in Cannelle et Vanille was just the beginning. In Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple, she goes deeper with 100 baking recipes, including breads such as sourdough boules, brioche rolls, chewy bagels, crusty baguettes and chocolate-olive oil babkas.

“I knew I wanted to do a lot more. Even now, after doing this book, I have a whole running notes of recipes that I could do, and I want to work on. So, I feel like baking is never-ending — I don’t run out of inspiration.”

All the recipes in Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple are gluten-free with dairy-free options. But Goyoaga’s staples (such as buttercreams, jams and compotes), breads, cakes, tarts and pies, cookies and holiday specialties offer inspiration for all bakers.

As Goyoaga points out in the book’s introduction, if gluten isn’t an issue, you can swap the total weight of the gluten-free flours and starches for wheat flour in many of her recipes. (While this substitution works in cakes, cookies and tarts, it doesn’t in her yeast breads, since she formulated these recipes using psyllium and flaxseed to achieve a glutenous effect.)

2020’s surge of sourdough interest may be in the past, but the conversation with her readers is ongoing. “I’ve learned so much from my readers that are constantly asking me questions. It’s just very dynamic and I love that,” says Goyoaga.

When Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple came out in late October 2021, she got an immediate response — a sign that people are still finding comfort in baking.

“From day one, people were incredible — like people making babka and challah. They’re not difficult recipes, but you need to know how to treat dough or understand certain things. And just like diving into it. And it really surprised me, and I love seeing that.”

Goyoaga comes from a long line of bakers, though she learned the craft in her own time.

Growing up in the small town of Amorebieta in Spanish Basque Country, she lived across the street from her grandparents’ pastry shop. After studying business and economics at university in nearby Bilbao, Goyoaga moved to the United States where she initially worked in the corporate world before returning to her roots.

The people who taught her in culinary school and who she worked for as a pastry chef at a five-star hotel — “most of them European men” — and her family of pastry chefs shared a similar approach. When she left the professional kitchen in 2006, Goyoaga embarked on a new path — creating alternative baking recipes and teaching herself photography, which she shared on her blog, Cannelle et Vanille.

Merging the Basque pastry tradition she grew up with and gluten-free baking became a means of creative expression. “I love being tied to my family that way,” she says.

“I needed to leave and lose something to understand why I needed to be part of it and make it my own. This I can only say with distance and time. Of course, in the moment, I had no clue. It all seemed like, ‘Is this the right choice? What am I doing? Can I make a living?’ I was making $9 an hour when I first started working in a hotel. And I could have never imagined in a million years that I would be writing books.”

She values being able to mesh teaching with the craftsmanship of baking in Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple. The sense of simplicity she conveys in the book — and refers to in the title — is grounded in philosophy and visual style rather than one-bowl or five-ingredient constraints.

“I want the recipes to be super pragmatic in the sense of steps and expectation and very methodical. But then I want to (imbue) the whole thing with romanticism that comes maybe more from photography, or the paper we chose,” says Goyoaga.

“For me, the simplicity in this book is also manifested in the balance between pragmatism and beauty.”

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