Everything I Know About Baking is Wrong (…Kind of)

I’ve been a baker all my life. There are pictures of toddler me covered in brownie batter, holding a whisk, mesmerized by the process. I’ve been baking bread since I was tall enough to reach the kitchen counter for Thanksgiving dinner prep. I’ve spent years in fine dining restaurants, honing my skills and learning how to produce artisan bread and pastries at scale. You could say I know my way around a dough.

And yet… Gluten free baking is making me feel like a beginner again.

I recently started helping my friends at Flakely as they grow, and the learning curve has been equal parts frustrating and fascinating. Flakely is a 100% gluten free, celiac safe bakery. There is not a single molecule of gluten in this bakery. My instincts, the ones I've spent my entire life building, are mostly backwards here. And I want to understand why.

A New Kind of Structure

I've written about gluten before, and honestly I could keep writing about it forever. But here's the short version: gluten is a protein formed from glutenin and gliadin that comes together when flour meets water. It's what makes dough stretchy and elastic. It builds structure, traps carbon dioxide from leavening agents, and is the foundational building block in most baking. Take it out of a cookie and you have a problem. Take it out of bread, where it is quite literally the foundation, and you are playing by an entirely different set of rules.

And I mean that literally. In conventional baking, gluten is doing so much invisible work that most bakers never have to think about it. When you knead dough, you're developing gluten. When dough springs back after you poke it, that's gluten. When a loaf holds its shape during a long cold ferment, when a croissant separates into distinct flaky layers, when a bagel has that specific satisfying chew. Gluten is behind all of it. It's not just one thing. It's the whole system.

So what happens when it's gone? Something has to hold things together. Something has to trap gas, build walls, create chew. Something has to do all of that invisible work, and it has to do it without the protein that conventional baking has always relied on.

That's where it gets interesting. Gluten free baking doesn't just remove one ingredient. It dismantles the entire structural logic of baking and rebuilds it from different materials. New proteins. New starches. Ingredients I had never worked with seriously before, doing jobs I didn't fully understand yet.

I don't have all the answers yet. That's kind of the point. What I do have is a growing list of questions I'm bringing into the kitchen every day. What replaces gluten's structural role? How do ingredients interact differently when the rules change? What chemical reactions shift, and why do some things still work in ways they probably shouldn't?

Going Against the Grain (Quite Literally)

Those questions don't stay abstract for long. Every day at the bakery, I run face first into them.

The most disorienting moment so far? Making bread out of something that looks exactly like cake batter. Every part of my brain said “this is so wrong.” Bread isn't supposed to pour. It's supposed to push back. It's supposed to have tension. But gluten free bread doesn't work that way, and standing there holding a bowl of what my hands kept insisting was cake batter, I realized how deeply my instincts are wired to a specific set of rules. Rules that only exist because of gluten.

And that keeps happening. The rules I internalized aren't universal laws. They were just gluten.

What I miss most is muscle memory. In conventional baking I don't have to think about whether something is ready. I can feel it, see it, smell it. A properly proofed loaf has a specific give when you poke it. A well developed dough has a specific resistance when you stretch it. Those cues are gone here. Gluten free baked goods don't look the same when they're done. They don't feel the same. The structural integrity is completely different, and the instincts I've spent so much time sharpening just don't apply. I'm relearning how to read what's in front of me, almost from scratch.

It's frustrating sometimes. I won't pretend otherwise. There's something genuinely disorienting about being skilled at something and suddenly not being able to trust yourself.

But mostly I'm curious. What does baking look like when you remove the most foundational structural tool used across almost every category? What steps in to replace it? What can and can't be replicated? I get to investigate those questions from inside a professional kitchen, with my hands in the dough every day. That's not a bad position to be in.

And here's what's already stopped me in my tracks. Gluten free baked goods, when made thoughtfully, are much closer to their conventional counterparts than I ever expected. I've seen gluten free croissants with real, actual flaky layers. That shouldn't be possible by the logic I walked in with. But it is. And now I need to know how.

Learning With a New System

So here's what I'm doing. Over the next few posts I'm going to dig into what's actually happening inside gluten free baking, starting with the ingredients. Potato starch, rice flour, xanthan gum, psyllium husk, tapioca starch, whey protein. These are the tools doing the work that gluten used to do. I want to understand each one, what job it's performing, and how they work together to build structure without the protein that conventional baking has always relied on.

And then I want to go further. Once I understand the ingredients, I want to look at the methods. The extra yeast. The warmer liquids. The techniques that get borrowed from conventional baking and the ones that get thrown out entirely. I want to know what's actually necessary and what's just habit that nobody has questioned yet. That's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, honestly.

Breaducated has always been about understanding baking as a system, not a set of recipes. Gluten free baking is forcing me to live that out in real time. I can't rely on what I know. I have to go back to first principles and rebuild my understanding from the ground up.

That's humbling. It's also exactly the kind of learning I find most interesting.

Not as an expert. As a professional baker who is genuinely starting over, and finding that kind of exciting. I hope you'll follow along.