Gluten-free cookies
The brief
Food Technologist Grace Ling
The brief that food technologist Grace Ling received was simple: formulate a gluten-free cookie that tastes just as moist, rich and delicious as the company's other cookies. It was also extraordinarily challenging. To understand just how challenging, it is necessary to appreciate the role gluten plays in baking.
If gluten didn't exist, somebody would have had to invent it. Gluten is an extremely functional ingredient – it has lots of properties and can do lots of things; this is particularly so with wheat gluten – without it, bread would not be the bread we know and love. When wheat flour dough is kneaded, glutenin molecules cross-link to make a sub-microscopic network and associate with gliadin, which contributes viscosity and extensibility to the mix. If such dough is leavened with yeast, sugar fermentation produces bubbles of carbon dioxide which, trapped by the gluten network, cause the dough to swell or rise. Baking coagulates the gluten which, along with starch, forms a heat-set skeleton, stabilising the shape of the final product. The glutenin in flour also contributes chewiness to baked products, including cookies.
Grace's challenge was to replace this proteinacious skeleton with something else yet retain the texture and 'mouth-feel' of wheat-containing baked goods.
Grace also had to consider manufacturing and post-production issues. The absence of gluten (or a gluten substitute) in a dough results in a liquid batter that cannot be processed using conventional production-line baking equipment. Products created without gluten or a substitute typically have poor handling and moulding properties, and other post-baking quality defects such as poor shelf life. So, while developing a safe, cost-effective system to manufacture the cookies, Grace had to also find a way to give the product an acceptable shelf life without using inordinate amounts of preservatives or other artificial ingredients.
