I haven't had a cinnamon roll in over a year, while I appreciate how much better I feel avoiding the long list of foods that disagree with my gut, there are just some things I miss, like cinnamon rolls. Some things you can find a substitute or a replacement for, but there really isn't anything I've yet found to replace the soft, ooey-gooeyness of wheat saturated cinnamon buns drenched in frosting. But I finally decided to give it a try, for one thing it is a Christmas tradition at our house and for another, my son has started a wheat-free diet (apparently he has food sensitivities as well) and since there are now two of us, I'm feeling a little bolder in experimenting with wheat-free yeast breads. For those of you who don't believe in miracles, apparently you've never tried making wheat-free bread!
Gluten is a miracle, it makes all sorts of wonderful baked goodness possible, with just flour, salt, sugar, water, and yeast, you can make that staple of human civilization: bread. While man may not live by bread alone, it sure makes existence so much tastier and cozier! With five simple ingredients you can create a miracle, otherwise you need a list as long as my arm, some rather expensive or hard to find, and then have to employ all sorts of creative processes to mimic what happens naturally when you mix flour and water, and the end result isn't the same, it is a passable facsimile for those of us who can't eat the real thing, but for all of our creative chemistry and kitchen ingenuity, it just isn't the same.
I started with a basic millet based bread recipe, and as that turned out, I decided to try something a little more complicated: cinnamon rolls!
As I had the millet and tapioca starch, I looked for a recipe that called for those ingredients, many of them out there call for a store-bought, pre-blended gluten free flour mix but as most contain something I can't (quinoa) or won't eat (garbanzo beans, ugh!), I was happy to find this one. It seems rather flexible with people swapping out all sorts of flours/starches for one another and looked like a good place to start. I did 1/2 cup each tapioca and corn starch and used millet for the flour as written. It would have been a disaster to roll out, but happily I found a great tutorial here. It was still a mess (how I miss you gluten, when rolling and shaping dough!), but not an utter disaster as it otherwise might have been. Boy were they ugly, but the taste was right on and the texture was very close (more cake-like than bready, but it's the gluten that makes bread, bread!) and I found something we can enjoy this Christmas while everyone else is devouring my beloved sourdough cinnamon rolls!
My next project will be a millet/tapioca pizza crust, I'll keep you posted!
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