When Liz first explained to me what it meant to suffer from coeliac disease, I was a little overwhelmed at the idea of not using wheat flour (or rye flour, or barley, or most prepackaged baking mixes) to make food we could both enjoy, but I’m a stubborn man and wasn’t ready to give in easily.

After only a few trips to our local health food store, I became aware of the incredibly lucrative gluten-free & gluten-intolerant retail consumer food market that charges almost unbelievable prices for staple wheat-free products like bread, wraps, cookies and snack bars … $8 for a tiny loaf of bread!! If you walked in to any run-of-the-mill grocery store and were forced to pay that much for a loaf of typical white bread, you’d probably throw a fit or at least insist on speaking to the manager or something, but this is the reality of anyone who suffers from celiac disease, and it became a new personal culinary mission for me.

There are many gluten-free replacements for regular all-purpose flour but as I would soon learn, many of them are invariably accompanied by some form of undesirable after-taste that amplifies the already obvious gluten-free nature of any celiac-friendly baked goods.

The most popular replacement available is without a doubt rice flour, with brown-rice and sweet-rice varieties also available. Next are a host of starches and “flours” which are essentially plant-based products that are ground up sufficiently to have a consistency that at first looks and feels like flour, however used in combination with other typical bread-making ingredients seem to react strangely and also impart flavours and aftertastes that have consistently left me wanting to curl up in the fetal position with a big puffy loaf of preservative-laden commercial white bread.

During all my months of experimentation, it occurred to me that even though I would never be able to completely reproduce the springy elastic properties of gluten, I could at least incorporate a more natural main ingredient that was not an offshoot of some unfamiliar plant-based starch. By so doing I hoped to consequentially reclaim a natural and predictable flavour that did not leave me wanting to avoid eating bread altogether; Liz would eat toast again dammit … and enjoy it … and not pay $8 or even more for the luxury!

Enter corn flour stage left. It’s natural, slightly sweet, very familiar to our taste buds and it’s almost as common (i.e. affordable) as wheat-based flour. Ground finer than cornmeal, corn flour reacts very well when used in bread and pizza doughs and I am now using it almost exclusively for all my baking experiments.

Granted, corn flour is yellow, not white like any standard flour, and of course the resulting dough has a warm yellow glow as you’d expect. For pie shells and pancakes, it actually looks completely normal because these recipes often call for eggs which impart the exact same colour thanks to the yolks. For a standard “white bread” mind you, this colour might not be what you want or expect, but let me just share this with any skeptics out there … if you’ve experimented as much as I have, and if you’ve paid through the nose as much as Liz has … all for the lowly pleasure of just having a sandwich or a piece of toast, I think you might tolerate a little colour in return for the naturally flavourful and affordable pleasure of toasting, dipping, grilling and cramming fresh yummy oven-baked gluten-free bread into your life … without the nasty aftertaste of rice, sorghum or garbonzo to remind you of your celiac-ness.

It has become an absolutely pleasurable weekly ritual now to break out the corn flour on “bread day” and begin whipping up pizza shells, burger buns, loaves of bread, wraps, flat-breads and all manner of baked goods knowing full well that the end result will be yummy, fresh, tasty and good … and most of all gluten-free.

There are still many aspects of gluten-free cooking to consider in order to make quality baked goods, but there is nothing so frustrating as having figured out most of the science of getting the right consistency, texture and aesthetics of an ace recipe only to have your efforts dashed by some nasty lingering aftertaste or questionable flavour … but corn flour is your friend, and it won’t let you down :)

I will continue posting a host of recipes here on the Impulsive Culinarian with the hope that you too will try using corn flour in your baking adventures, let me know how it goes!