Tuesday 2 January 2018

Reflections and resolutions

As of a few days after Christmas, it’s now ten years that I’ve been gluten-free. That’s well over a third of my life! I had fully intended to mark the occasion with not one, but two new recipes that were not only seasonable and festive, but also of the traditionally-French persuasion that has been an inspiration for my baking since the beginning. But (as life has tended to do these last weeks-months-years), life got in the way of being able to fine-tune these recipes in a timely manner (really, there are only so many failed bûches de noël one can stand to make before deciding that whatever comes out of the oven this time will be the holiday dessert, no matter how it looks!) - and so, by the time Christmas came and went (so quickly!) both of these recipes were still in something of a rough-draft stage: pretty enough to photograph, plenty good enough to eat, but not quite polished enough to post. 
Bûche de noël
Buckwheat pain d'épices
Funnily, that says a lot about how far we - the gluten-free community - have come in these ten years: back then, anything reasonably edible and presentable was cause for celebration and sharing the recipe would be a matter of course. Now, we have the luxury (perhaps even a little bit of a duty?) of being perfectionistic, because we’ve collectively proven that things made of buckwheat and beans and chestnut and millet and potato and rice and sorghum can and should be every bit as good and as real as those made from wheat and rye. And so I give you pictures for now, because while these things were good, I know they can be better. It didn’t happen in time for Christmas, but it will happen. The bar for victory is higher, and that’s a good thing. 


So, this New Year’s Day, I propose a resolution for the celiac/GF community: going forward, let’s remove phrases like “too good to be gluten-free” from our vocabulary. Clearly, if we’re saying that about something, it’s good and it is gluten-free. There was a time when that may have been surprising. Now, though, we have more than enough examples of beautiful and delicious breads, cookies, pastry, and cakes to show that this phrase has lost its relevance. Is it harder, does it take longer to fine-tune a recipe? Maybe. Is there still a lot of bad GF food out there? Yes, of course. Will baking disasters and terrible recipe attempts still happen? Oh yeah. But it’s easy for us to forget, with the larger learning curve we face with our flours, that those disasters and disappointments happen to wheat-bakers, too. And yet, still we all seem to keep being surprised when something is good even now that "too good" seems to have become more of the norm than the exception. So, GF bakers and GF eaters: this year, let’s resolve to stop perpetuating the stereotype. Here’s to a year of baking and eating and sharing things that are exactly good enough to be gluten-free, and getting even better all the time. 
Good bread. Gluten free.