Discover delicious gluten-free holiday recipes with easy ingredient swaps to enjoy festive meals without compromising on flavor.
Delicious Alternatives for a Festive Gluten-Free Celebration
The holiday baking and cooking season for Thanksgiving and Christmas presents a wonderful opportunity to explore gluten-free alternatives for your festive feasts. A variety of gluten-free ingredients can be seamlessly integrated into traditional recipes, allowing everyone to enjoy the flavors of the season without compromising on dietary needs. Some popular gluten-free substitutes include hulled buckwheat groats, which add a nutty flavor, and Cup4Cup flour, designed to mimic all-purpose flour in baking. Almond flour is another excellent option, providing moisture and richness to baked goods.
Additionally, chocolate lovers can rejoice with gluten-free chocolate chips from brands like Equal Exchange and Enjoy Life, ensuring sweet treats are accessible to all. For those craving pasta, Jovial offers gluten-free options, including pasta and mac & cheese. To complement snacks, Simple Mills crackers provide a crunchy alternative. These ingredients not only enhance your holiday recipes but also ensure that everyone can partake in the joy of festive cooking and baking.
Deliciously Adapted: Transform Your Festive Feast with Gluten-Free Twists!
Well welcome back to Cottage Farmstead if we haven’t met before I’m Rebecca and despite the unseasonably warm weather that we’re having these days the holiday season is upon us with Thanksgiving kicking it off in a couple of weeks so I thought I’d take a little bit of time to talk about some of my favorite gluten-free swaps for baking and.
Entertaining in the holiday season I am Gluten Sensitive I don’t I’m not Celiac so I don’t have to avoid it entirely or be quite as cautious with it but I have found some great swaps that work for those who are celiac or Gluten Sensitive that are delicious and most people don’t even know they’re even gluten-free so my number one secret for glutenfree baking.
Is to use cold buckwheat flour and I’ve talked about this before in some other videos and I have a blog post that I’ll link down below about how I make that swap but I find my whole Buckwheat Groats at Azure standard it’s the best price that I found for our area is I can’t find this in the stores I do have to grind it myself we do have a older.
Grain Mill that we use but if you have like a high powered like Vitamix mixer you could rind this at home as well even without a Grain Mill and it turns into this beautiful white flour here and I mix this 50/50 with some sort of cup for cup or measure for measure flour and it gives it a nice light uh slightly nuttier flavor because I have found that.
With a lot of the cup for cup mixes they’re made with rice starch potato starch things like that and those starches are relatively flavorless and traditional wheat does does have a flavor to it so being able to add in the buckwheat is a great way to add a little bit more flavor and when I do this most people don’t even know the recipes are.
Made gluten-free and this swap works really great for everything except bread so this works great for cookies quick breads cake pie crusts all those sorts of things where you want to have a gluten-free flour works great in that I just haven’t had it work great for your more traditional breads but otherwise when I bake with this most people don’t.
Even know the recipe was made gluten-free this is a great swap if you have some traditional holiday favorite recipes cuz sometimes you have a recipe that’s been passed down for generations and you want that particular cookie you don’t want someone else’s molasses cookie you want your molasses cookie that you grew up eating so this is a.
Great way to just swap the flour out and you’ll be able to use the exact same recipe so I’ll link below to where we buy our buckwheat GRS as well as to our blog post where I talk about how I make that swap with traditional flour to the buckwheat and cup for cup blend as I mentioned with the buckwheat GRS I do use cup for cup flour so that’s the.
Second thing that I use in our holiday baking my favorite is the Bob’s Red Mill which is comes in this blue bag when you’re looking for a cup for cup flour the one thing to try and avoid using at least in our experience is anything with chickpea flour chickpea flour has a an off-putting flavor to me it tastes kind of metallic car Nathan’s able to eat.
Things with it in it but a lot of people don’t like the taste of that so get the blue bag not the yellow bag of the cup for cup from Bob’s Redmill while we’re able to find this in our local grocery store it comes in smaller bags and it’s a bit more expensive so I like to buy it in a big 4B bag and I also get that from Azure standard and I’ll link it down.
Below and it’s currently on sale right now for the holiday season which makes it even more affordable to cook with and the last flower I’m going to talk about is my third Swap and that is almond flour this gives a very rich and chew texture to some of your baked goods so things like your brownies are really good with this we have some muffin.
Recipes that we really like with this it gives it a little bit extra protein and fat in it that makes them more satisfying uh as well as a really delicious nutty flavor uh for us this is cheapest locally at our Aldi about 565 per pound for the almond flour so that is where we get our alond flow from but you can also purchase it online if you.
Can’t find it locally so continuing on the baking cream a lot of gluten-free recipes that are written specifically to be gluten-free call for things like tapioca starch ay root powder coconut flour there’s lots of other different alternative flowers it’s may be called for um as well as zanam gum that’s used.
As a binding agent we use tapioca starch in a few of our recipes especially things like waffle and biscuits where you want to have a little bit of a crisp texture to it this helps kind of brown and crisp up nicely this is also great if you’re making things like gravies where you want to thicken up your sauce so it’s.
Perfect for your mashed potatoes at this time of year rather than using traditional flour so tapioca starch is one that we can sometimes find at the grocery store there’s also a menite bulk food store that carries it sometimes but I usually only find organic through Azure standard so if organic is something that matters to you.
I can link below to their organic tapioca starch otherwise you probably can find it at your grocery store near you and Holiday baking would not be complete without chocolate chips and while chocolate itself doesn’t have gluten in it a lot of times if you’re baking for someone who has Celiac you will have to read the the fine print on.
The back to see if it was processed in a facility that also handles wheat because then it would not be considered 100% gluten-free the two chocolate chips that we really enjoy baking with that are 100% gluten-free are these equal exchange bittersweet chocolate chips these are a darker chocolate and they’re really really good we’ll just eat them.
By the handful they’re so good rather than just buying bars of chocolate and these are processed in a facility that does not process several of the common allergens so not just gluten but also some of the other ones um these are also soy free which is also another great thing I’ll link below to where we get these we don’t usually find these on the.
Shelves locally but the 78% chocolate chocolate chips really really good the other chocolate chips that were’re able to find here locally on the grocery store shelves is the enjoy life brand and they are free of 14 other allergens but they also are processed in a facility that does not handle wheat so that makes them gluten-free so this is.
Something you can include in your holiday baking and these are little bit easier to find at least for us on grocery store shelves pretty much all the major grocery stores around here carry this brand they don’t usually have quite as dark of a chocolate as our favorite one but these are still really delicious in baked goods so a lot of the.
Holiday foods are pretty easy to have gluten-free because turkeys don’t typically contain gluten in them depending on how they were processed and your source of them same thing with a lot of your vegetables you w have to worry about gluten in those typically but if your family enjoys mac and cheese is one of your Thanksgiving side dishes.
You will have to swap out your pasta and potentially make sure you’re not putting any flour into that recipe so since I started eating gluten-free we have found that our favorite gluten-free pasta is the jovial brand and they come in all the different shapes I have the shells here we’ve gotten the spirals they even have the.
Traditional elbow macaroni as well and it is so good you can’t tell it’s not regular pasta and one of the reasons is that the founder of jovial Foods has a daughter who’s Gluten Sensitive and can’t have gluten but they’re an Italian family so you know pasta is really important to them so they found a way to make really delicious gluten-free pasta.
It Cooks up the same way and you cannot tell that it is gluten-free sometimes gluten-free pastas can have a funny texture or be kind of bland but this tastes just like regular pasta and it’s so good one of our local grocery stores does carry one of the pasta shapes of the jovial brand and so we can buy it locally occasionally but if I want.
Things like the shells or the spirals I do have to buy it online so I’ll link below to where we purchase it online in case you’d like to check out this pasta the same company also makes readymade mac and cheese so if you are wanting to make your traditional mac and cheese recipe and not mess with Grandma’s recipe but you still want to have a.
Small side dish for those that need gluten-free this is a great alternative as well it’s not as good as homemade but we purchased a few of these when we were expecting our first child and so we they’ve been pretty handy to just dump and go when we want a mac and cheese side dish real quick and it makes enough for about two to three servings so it’s.
Really good if you’re only catering for one person that is eating gluten-free and no holiday gathering would be complete without some sort of charty board our favorite gluten-free cracker to sit out is the simple Mills brand almond flow crackers and it’s just their basic sea salt it is perfectly paired with things like your meats and your.
Cheeses and your olives and all your other toppings that you want we also love this cracker just by itself it’s almost like a Wheat Thin not quite as strong of a flavor but it’s similar size and texture we usually get ours from Costco as it is the best price but we do also find them at Publix’s around here in our.
Area so you might be able to find these in your grocery store otherwise I’ll link below to where you can purchase them online and lastly I thought I’d mention a excellent cookbook if you are trying to accommodate people with food sensitivities this is by Daniel Walker and it’s called celebrations and she has to eat somewhat paleo which involves not.
Having any grain which is perfect if you’re trying to cook gluten-free so in here she goes through a lot of the traditional recipes like say your green bean casserole and recreates them in a way that those are food sensitivities can enjoy safely but she also comes up with a lot of really good new recipes that are great to add to holiday meals.
One of our favorite recipes is roasted brussels sprouts with bacon Jam so so so good and we bring it out usually at the holiday season as it is a delicious assign dish to go with your Thanksgiving or Christmas feasts so I’ll link below to where you can get this cookbook as it is a great resource if you’re having to cook regularly for people with food.
Sensitivities and your families for Holiday gatherings well hope you found this video helpful on how to make holidays Gathering special and inclusive of your gluten-free and Gluten Sensitive family members and friends if you have any questions about like a particular recipe and how I like to convert it you can.
Make a comment down below and I’m happy to answer any questions or even make another YouTube video on a particular recipe and like I mentioned throughout the video I’ll link below to everything that I mentioned in this recipe so you’re able to find it and get it ordered in time for holiday baking and cooking this year and with that I’ll.
Catch you next time
