When I made my final test batch of bread sticks, there were plenty of people over at my apartment, including an old friend who’d been out of the country for most of the past few years and so had mostly been out of touch.  He was obeying our “no gluten in the apartment” rule, of course, but hadn’t stopped to think through how that meant every bit of food in sight was gluten-free.  So when I handed him his share of the freshly buttered breadsticks, then came back five minutes later to ask how they were, he said, “Yeah, they’re good.”  I asked him, “So they don’t taste fake? or weird? or anything like that?  You wouldn’t think they were gluten-free?”  He blinked at me several times, then asked as it sank in, “Wait, these are gluten-free?  Really?”

That’s always how I know a recipe is done.  🙂

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I don’t know if there’s really a story behind these muffins in particular; the first muffins I made, I was still in the habit of sticking to the exact amounts of the glutinous recipe I was adapting from, and using truly generous amounts of xanthan gum out of some sort of fear that if I didn’t provide enough superglue, the end result would fall apart in my hands, in keeping with its true nature as a desperately fabricated objection to the laws of physics.  I was still making imitations of food, not food itself.  But anyway . . .
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