Non-gluten baking

Just remember this central theme: when you’re eating whole foods, choose non-gluten meals as a RULE, and consume Paleo and/or non-inflammatory treats as an EXCEPTION on the whole. Then you don’t need to worry so much about gluten-free additives and junk, nor spiking your blood sugar, nor setting a pattern that will drive temptation later, when you may not have your own kitchen to hand.

Making treats once in a while using Paleo- or AIP-compliant ingredients is a much more sustainable plan for long-term health than eating gluten-free manufactured foods. In fact, it can also be deeply nourishing for the whole family to be able to share a treat, which helps with compliance, and also feels like what everyone else does normally.

In ancestral-tradition recipes like the Paleo and AIP diets, the whole food, with its naturally-sweet properties, provides the sweetness instead of sugar or sugar substitutes. Examples include cassava, plantain, bananas, berries, fruit puree like applesauce, and more. Some Paleo recipes use honey, where AIP recipes do not.

Note, also, that as you eat less sweets (1)  transitioning to a more wholesome, healing diet, your craving for sugar will decrease. And then those sweet things lose their appeal (2), confirmed when one gets into your mouth by accident, so that the cravings themselves wane over time.

AIP recipes do not use a gum or emulsifier additive. If you do encounter a not-quite-compliant Paleo recipe that calls for a gum, you can substitute in Pixie Dust (3) instead (learn more about it here (4)). Pixie Dust is made of several types of seeds, such as flaxseed, chia, and psyllium, which have a gel-like action when mixed with liquids. Where nuts and seeds are avoided in the elimination phase of the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) diet, it’s an option for people who can tolerate seeds, or search for an AIP recipe if you have something in mind. You can, for example, make AIP banana bread (5), no sweat. AIP recipes often include pure gelatin as a binder in place of egg, which provides a bonus nutritional burst along with deliciousness. To find AIP recipes, you can even just search for the recipe you want and add the acronym “AIP” to it and you’ll get a good list of results – or see the Resource Directory for a list of AIP recipe bloggers.  It’s fortunate for us that the Paleo and AIP communities work hard to come up with safe alternatives to commercial gluten-free foods if you really do have a “baked good” craving.

Separately, but related: you might also notice that AIP recipes use gelatin in place of eggs for a “binding” effect when you’re avoiding eggs.

Some of the ingredients selected for their sweeter properties also double as the primary component of a recipe – the flour, for example, might be made from cassava, or the pancake from a slice of plantain – or the moisture, traditionally achieved through fat. Here, the moisture from fat is achieved through ingredients like applesauce and/or healthy fats for baking, like coconut oil or butter.

Nutritionist Mickey Trescott has a good guide to good fats (6):

• Fats Suitable for Cooking(Saturated)
  • Coconut Oil, Lard, Tallow, Duck and Goose Fat, Palm Oil
• Fats Suitable for Eating Cold(Monounsaturated)
  • Olive Oil, Avocado Oil
• Otherwise Healthy Fats Avoided on the Autoimmune Protocol:
  • Butter, Ghee, Nuts, Nut Oils, Cold-Processed Seed Oils (sesame, flax)

Saturated fats are the best kind of fat to cook and bake with.  This is because saturated fats, such as butter, coconut oil, and bacon fat, don’t oxidize at higher cooking temperatures, meaning they don’t go rancid and create free radicals (7). Recent publications such as Dr. Catherine Shanahan’s 2017 book, “Deep Nutrition” and Harvard physician Dr. David Ludwig’s book, “Always Hungry?” and even in the 2015 US Dietary Guidelines. Yet what is typically found in gluten-free packaged foods are unsaturated, easily-oxidized fats such as processed oils, hydrogenated oils, and industrial seed oils (canola, cottonseed, corn, safflower, sunflower, soybean, peanut, and grapeseed oil.  Add to this the long shelf life of these foods and you have oxidized or “rancid” oils can cause that cellular and immune damage.