flours with the right characteristics, including the same
nutritional profile and how fine or coarse it’s milled,”
he says.
PHOTO CREDIT: opposite, Ellyn Charters; top, Nichole Chartier
Today, his English muffins are among the top sellers
at Foods By George. “I wanted them to be big and tall
like the Wolferman’s English muffins I grew up on.
They’re rice-flour based and packed four in a stack. I
like texture, and these are crunchy outside but soft and
tender inside.”
Renee Zonka, RD, dean of the School of Culinary Arts
at Chicago’s Kendall College, stresses the all-important
taste factor on the day she devotes to GF recipe
modification with her students. She suggests that for a
cookie or muffin mix, she might add 100% nut flour,
such as almond, pistachio, chestnut or cashew.
ABOVE: At Kendall College, Renee Zonka suggests to students that nut flours, such
as the chestnut flour used in these cookies, will yield delicious GF goodies.
“It depends on what you’re making,” Zonka says. “For our
Chestnut Madeleine, ingredients include chestnut flour,
butter, vanilla and baking powder. Whether on the savory
side or the pastry side, we want it to be delicious.”
capturing food dollars
Knowing that bread and pasta would be the two major
categories of product a person diagnosed with celiac
disease would miss, “those are the type of items we
produce,” Chookazian says. “Our objective is to capture
more of their food dollar from breakfast to dinner.”
Dean Lavornia, CEPC, M.Ed., has a similar objective
in mind. As associate professor/department chair of the
International Baking & Pastry Institute at Johnson & Wales
University, Providence, R.I., he aims to give students the
know-how to take traditional recipes and develop their own
GF blends with flavor, texture and mouthfeel as true to the
original as possible.
“Instead of sending guests to someone else, you want to
be able to provide for them,” Lavornia says. “I encourage
students to bring in old-fashioned, much-loved recipes and
make them GF. Since 1 in 133 people are diagnosed as
celiac, there’s a huge group of the population that has no
choice but to eat gluten-free.”
At Johnson & Wales, he continues to be heavily involved
in GF product development. “I just came up with a GF
cinnamon roll,” he says. “There’s a lot of product out
there, but they’re more expensive and, in my experience,
not worth the money, as far as taste and texture. I want it
to be great, so I spend a lot of time with R&D. We make
it in class, and I post the recipe.” ( www.chefglutenfreek.
blogspot.com)
Lavornia offers two mandates for those serving guests
who seek to dine gluten-free. “As professionals, we must
be extra diligent in making sure the ingredients we’re
sourcing are truly GF. The package needs to say ‘
gluten-free,’ not just ‘wheat-free.’ And, we must be educating our
staff, so there’s no cross contact. That’s as important as the
ingredients we’re sourcing.”
NEW YORK-BASED AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST KAREN WEISBERG HAS COVERED
THE ISSUES AND LUMINARIES OF THE FOOD-AND-BEVERAGE WORLD—BOTH COMMERCIAL AND NONCOMMERCIAL—FOR MORE THAN 25 YEARS.
