"Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Baking" Wallace/Reinhart
The Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Baking: 80 Low-Carb Recipes that Offer Solutions for Celiac Disease, Diabetes, and Weight Loss
I waited for over 9 months for this book. Bought it on Kindle, returned for refund within a couple of hours.
With Reinhart's WW baking book I felt I was enjoying the distillation of knowledge from hundreds of bakers from all over the world. Not so here. Denene Wallace is the lead and she offers what are obviously excellent but very personal solutions for certain life threatening conditions, Reinhart seems to have a student role here.
I would have liked to have seen the book have an alternative description. "The joy of cooking with ground nuts and seeds, xantham gum, Stevia and egg whites."
The reason it feels like a personal approach to gluten free baking is that some of the choices are not shared by others in the gluten-free blogging sphere. From Wallace's own circle of influence the only non-gluten flour that she feels able to recommend is that from chick peas/garbanzos. I know Gluten Free Girl hates the stuff and I'm not a fan either (reminds me of grass pea/almorta flour). The main 'flours' called for are ground almonds, hazelnuts, pecans and coconut and ground flax/linseed and sesame. Lots and lots of them.
Xanthan gum is used pretty much exclusively and I didn't see any mention of the adverse reactions many people have to this powder. No chia seeds in this book.
The sandwich loaf commended by Reinhart has, get this, 8 egg whites. The advice is to buy egg whites in a catering pack so that you don't need to worry about what to do with the yolks. Animal welfare is important to me and I pay a premium to source my eggs from responsible producers (the minimum free range standards aren't enough in my view) so this isn't an option for me. Egg whites feature very prominently in other recipes also.
I've been successfully losing weight without trying very hard having shifted my tastes away from refined flours to WW and by coaxing myself to accept and even prefer less sugar in my foods and drinks. I've also come to a personal belief that WW flours are healthiest when they have been given a long period to ferment (the biga and soaker approach is one I'm happy with). I want to adapt the way I cook quick breads, muffins and cookies as these don't give the gluten in the WW flours a chance to get worked on by yeast and bacteria.
I am thankful that I have no health issues which would force me to change to the recipes in this book which, to me, seem like endless variations of macarons sweetened with Stevia. Without a life threatening condition I don't see who would adopt these recipes, even for weight loss you'd need to be extremely focused to commit to this style of cooking. The co-author has admitted that, despite his motivation, at the point of publication he hadn't been able to and the website we were invited to go to online to learn of his progress over the last few months doesn't make it clear either.
For someone hoping to casually reduce the amount of gluten they are consuming, this is not a book I can recommend. I earnestly hope it is of use to those who need to change their approach to cooking and eating for medical reasons, if that's you, I wish you every success.