Do you ever miss eating pancakes in the morning, or cake, or pizza? Did you know that you don’t actually have to miss them? Yes, it is possible to eat your cake and keep your GI system intact too. There are several ways to go about it, but the main one we’re going to talk about here is the gluten free flour strategy.

It’s best, fastest, and easiest, when you have someone with celiac disease in your life, or if you are the celiac of the family, to have all purpose gluten free flour on-hand or ready to mix up into whatever you need, rather than food avoidance.

Either buy a pre-made all purpose gluten-free flour mix, or mix it up yourself using the individual gluten-free flours. The Gluten Free Mall offers a variety of premixed all purpose flours, each taste-tested by our staff and given the thumbs-up to be offered on our site. In addition, Celiac.com offers excellent recipes for all purpose gluten-free flours that are guaranteed tried and true. The recipes are submitted by people like you, who have given them quite a bit of thought, and then send the results of their efforts in to share on our Web site for our whole gluten-free community to benefit from.

Gluten free flour can usually be swapped right in for regular flour, but it does behave differently, so special care needs to be taken when mixing it in with wet ingredients when following a recipe. The goal is to not knock too much of the air bubbles out of the flour once it touches the wet mix. The bubbles form quickly and are delicate—even more so than wheat flour, because it’s not as stretchy or absorbent.

When done properly you or your guests should never really be able to tell the difference between regular wheat flour and a good all purpose gluten-free flour. This is especially true if you begin your baking experiments with foods that only call for a small amount of flour. Depending on the ingredients in your flour, you can actually enhance the flavor of foods with a hearty and wholesome cottage-baked feel. Last thing to remember; if you accidentally mix your all purpose gluten free flour too much you may bake up a brick instead of banana bread—and that’s no way to treat your favorite celiac!