Alternative Baker

While most gluten-free baking cookbooks simply replace all-purpose wheat flour, usually with white rice, tapioca and potato flours, this book celebrates the wide array of grains, nuts and seeds that add unique texture and flavor to desserts. Recipes oust hard-to-find gums, such as guar and xanthan, and minimise starches, such as corn, tapioca and potato. Alternative Baker highlights lesser-known flours such as millet, oat, buckwheat, chestnut, sorghum and mesquite. These flours provide recipe with superior texture, flavor and nutritional value to boot.

Alternative Baker features fruit-based recipes that range from breakfast breads to pies, tarts, crisps, cobblers, cakes, custards and small treats like cookies and bars. Examples include Cranberry Millet Scones with Vanilla Bean Glaze; Buckwheat, Pear & Walnut Galettes with Salty Honey Caramel; Salty Caramel & Banana Cream Tarts in a Mesquite Crust and Maple Bourbon Peach Cobbler with Brown Butter Biscuits. In addition, the book includes recipes for basics like sauces and accompaniments.

Author Alanna Taylor-Tobin is a classically trained pastry chef who has been developing recipes and techniques for her own gluten sensitivity for more than a decade. Her love of alternative, unrefined flours, sweeteners and organic produce is a product of her upbringing by health-nut hippie parents.

About the Author

Alanna Taylor-Tobin is a classically trained pastry chef with experience as a professional cook, baker and pastry chef, recipe developer, food photographer, writer and blogger. She blogs at The Bojon Gourmet, which receives 140,000 page views per month. Her work has been featured in countless small web and print publications as well as Food52, The Huffington Post, Williams Sonoma, The Kitchn and Elle à Table. Alanna lives in San Francisco, California.