Thursday, July 24, 2014

Gluten-free pie crust - easy as pie

Making a traditional tasting pie crust made without gluten ingredients isn't particularly easy in my opinion.  For a ready-made crust, the Kinnikinnick product is very good, but the crusts are fairly small.  To get one regular 9" crust, you need to defrost and roll out the two KK crusts and roll them out into one large crust.  That is kind of a lot of work as well.

For the easiest gluten-free pie crust ever, the cookie crumb crust can not be beat!  For chocolate & peanut butter pie or chocolate cream pies, use gluten-free Oreo type cookies.  For lemon bars, use graham style crackers or gingersnap cookies.  For a more traditional crust, sugar cookies can be used, but you might need to add a pinch of salt to counter balance the sweetness factor.

The cookies should be crunchy - not soft - in order to make the best crust.  Cookie crust recipes are bountiful on food.com - just remember to use GLUTEN-FREE cookies if using a regular cookie crust recipe.  All the recipes I've found and used require butter so I don't know how non-dairy butter substitutes works in cookie pie crust recipes.

I recently made lemon bars using Three Bakers graham crackers for the crust and the glutenoids we served them to wanted seconds.  They don't eat gluten-free and, truth be told, might go out of their way to avoid gluten-free replacement foods.  I've also used crunchy ginger cookies from Trader Joe's and Pamela's for the lemon bar crust.  The result is always the same - most people want more than one bar and many ask for the recipe.  And isn't that why we bake to share with others in the first place?!

Gluten-free in a pandemic? No problem!

Not to make light of the current situation the world finds itself in, but I'm so thankful that I learned to self isolate when I was diag...