How do I bake without gluten, dairy or eggs?

Baking substitutions fail when people swap ingredient for ingredient without asking what the original was contributing. Once you know whether something was providing structure, moisture, fat or lift, the replacement becomes obvious.

What you'll need

• Gluten-free flour blend (optional)
• Xanthan gum (optional)
• Plant milk and oil (optional)

Step by step

1. Work out what each ingredient was doing.Gluten gives structure and elasticity. Eggs bind, lift and enrich. Butter gives fat, flavour and tenderness. Replace the function, not the item.
2. Use a gluten-free blend, not a single flour.A blend of rice, tapioca and potato starch behaves far better than any one flour alone. Buy a blend or use a tested recipe's mix.
3. Add a binder to gluten-free baking.Xanthan gum or psyllium husk, usually about half a teaspoon per 100g of flour. Without it, gluten-free bakes crumble.
4. Let gluten-free batters rest before baking.Twenty to thirty minutes. The starches hydrate and the gritty texture that people associate with gluten-free largely disappears.
5. Replace eggs by their function.For binding: flaxseed and water, or apple purée. For lift: extra raising agent plus an acid. For richness: extra fat. Meringue cannot be substituted with any of these.
6. Replace butter with oil or a hard plant fat.Oil for moisture in cakes and muffins; a firm block plant fat where you need to cream or rub in, such as pastry and biscuits.
7. Replace milk with a plant milk of similar fat content.Oat and soy behave most like dairy in baking. Adding a teaspoon of vinegar makes a buttermilk substitute that reacts with bicarbonate.
8. Expect to adjust liquid, and follow tested recipes at first.Gluten-free flours absorb differently. A recipe developed for the substitution is far more reliable than adapting one that was not.

Tips

• Naturally free-from bakes are the easiest route: flourless chocolate cake, meringues, macaroons and many nut-based cakes need no substitution at all.
• For anyone with coeliac disease, cross-contamination matters as much as ingredients — separate utensils, tins and surfaces.
• Aquafaba, the liquid from a tin of chickpeas, whips like egg white and works in meringues and mousses.

Common mistakes

• Swapping wheat flour for a single gluten-free flour — No single alternative flour has the properties of wheat. A blend plus a binder is what approximates it.
• Leaving out xanthan gum or another binder — Gluten was providing the structure. Without a replacement, the bake crumbles as soon as it is cut.
• Using apple purée to replace eggs in a sponge — It binds but provides no lift. A sponge relying on eggs for aeration will be dense and heavy.

Questions people ask