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Custard pies have a long family tree, stretching back to the Middle Ages. The Forme of Cury, a collection compiled by the cooks of King Richard II in the 14th century, contains several custard recipes - including one for a dish called "daryols." These were made with cream (or almond milk), eggs, and sugar, flavored with saffron, and baked in a "coffin" (read: pie crust):
Take Creme of Cowe mylke. oþer of Almandes. do þerto ayren with sugur, safroun, and salt, medle it yfere. do it in a coffyn. of II. ynche depe. bake it wel and serue it forth.[source]
Or in more modern English:
Take cream or almond milk, add egg with sugar, saffron and salt. Mix it up. Pour it in a two-inch deep pastry case. Bake it well and serve.[source]
In other words: custard pie. The basic idea has changed remarkably little in more than six centuries. The flavorings in this rum-vanilla custard pie with chocolate chips, however, tell a much newer - and decidedly New World - story.
Vanilla and chocolate both come directly from the Americas - specifically South America. Vanilla beans are the cured pods of a climbing orchid that grows from southern Mexico into northern South America, while chocolate begins with the seeds found inside the pods of the cacao tree, native from Costa Rica southward into tropical South America. Rum joins the story by way of sugarcane. The plant itself did not originate in the Americas, but the invention of modern rum - and much of its complicated history - is deeply entwined with the colonies and sugar plantations of the New World.
Vanilla has the strange reputation of being boring or cheap. The black bean - most commonly kept as an extract or seen as only the tiniest of black specks in an overall white dish - is not as exciting as the dark and decadent "chocolate." But real vanilla belongs in the same rarefied company as saffron: precious, labor-intensive, and quite exquisite.
Vanilla beans are the cured seedpods of climbing orchids in the Vanilla genus. Long before the arrival of the Spanish, Indigenous peoples throughout the orchid's native American range harvested and used its fragrant pods. The Totonac people became especially associated with vanilla, while Nahua sources describe tlilxochitl - the "black flower" - as a perfume, medicine, and flavoring for their chocolate drinks. The Spanish introduced vanilla to Europe in the 16th century, beginning its worldwide use.[source]
Vanilla itself traveled easily enough. Its pollination system did not. The orchid would grow and flower in other tropical regions, but without the ecology of its native range, it rarely produced pods. Botanists eventually learned to pollinate the flowers artificially, but the fast, practical method that transformed vanilla cultivation was devised in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy living on the French island of Réunion. After learning how watermelon flowers were fertilized, Albius worked out how to lift the tiny membrane separating the male and female parts of the vanilla flower and press them together by hand.[source]
That deceptively simple technique allowed vanilla production to spread far beyond Mexico. Réunion developed a thriving vanilla industry, followed by its much larger neighbor Madagascar, which now dominates world production. Albius received neither wealth nor much recognition during his lifetime, but his discovery shaped the entire modern vanilla trade.[source]
Remarkably, vanilla flowers are still pollinated one by one, by hand, across most of the vanilla-growing world. The resulting pods must then pass through a long curing process before they develop the deep fragrance we recognize as vanilla. All that work makes real vanilla one of the most expensive spices in the world. Yet, like saffron in the Middle Ages, it is added to absolutely everything. Baking cookies? Add vanilla extract. Making ice cream? Bring out the vanilla bean. Chocolate cake? Add a teaspoon of vanilla; it will make the cake taste even better.
That last pairing is nothing new. Nahua chocolate makers were flavoring cacao with tlilxochitl centuries before either ingredient reached Europe. Vanilla and chocolate have been keeping company for a very long time.
Chocolate begins with cacao, another gift from the tropical Americas. The seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree were cultivated and consumed by Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of Europeans - but their uses were very different from what we know as chocolate today. They had a "decadent" reputation to be sure; the beans were used as currency, accepted as tribute, and were used to make a drink that was associated with the wealthy and powerful.[source] But that drink was not the sweet hot chocolate of modern day.
Among the Aztecs, and other tribes of Mexico, cacao was ground and then poured into a frothy bitter drink. The Florentine Codex describes an astonishing assortment of cacao drinks - red, black, white, honeyed, and flavored with "tender vanilla" - served in decorated gourds.[source] Chocolate could be served hot or cold, and flavored with any number of local ingredients, including chili, vanilla, and honey. The whisking created a distinctive foamy top.
Newcomers to Mexico commented upon how bitter the drink was by European standards, but the Spanish colonists as a whole loved it. Jose de Acosta, writing in 1598, said of chocolate:
"..it is the most prized drink and is offered to noblemen as they pass through [Indigenous tribes'] lands. Both Indians and Spaniards, and especially Spanish women who have grown accustomed to the land, adore their black chocolate."[source]
The Spanish carried chocolate across the Atlantic, where it remained primarily a drink for several more centuries. In Europe, the traditional preparation was combined with Old World spices and sweeteners. A Spanish recipe published in 1631 combines cacao not only with vanilla, chili, and traditional Meso-American herbs, but also with cinnamon, anise, and a hefty quantity of sugar.[source] By the later 17th century, fashionable "chocolate houses" had appeared in European cities, and in the 19th century new machinery and manufacturing techniques finally transformed chocolate from a luxurious drink into the bars, candies, and baking chocolate we recognize today.[source]
For our purposes, however, the most important transformation came much earlier: chocolate was introduced to sugar. Sugarcane was an Old World plant, but European colonists cultivated it on an enormous scale in the tropical Americas. Here it became not only a companion to chocolate, but also the foundation for another ingredient of this pie: rum.
Rum begins with sugarcane, which is a type of grass native to Southeast Asia. (It's actually a close cousin of sorghum: - another tall, jointed grass, this one better known for flour than syrup.) That's a strange starting point for a drink so thoroughly identified with the Caribbean - but sugarcane had a long journey ahead of it before it ever met a still.
The sugarcane grown today was first domesticated around New Guinea some eight thousand years ago, then carried westward into Southeast Asia, China, and India.[source] Ancient observers noticed its unusual sweetness early on. One of the oldest surviving accounts comes by way of Nearchus, a general under Alexander the Great who marched through the Indus Valley around 327 BC. Nearchus's own writings didn't survive, but the geographer Strabo preserved his report a few centuries later, describing reeds in India that "produce honey, although there are no bees."[source]
That fermenting didn't take long to catch up, though. By around the 3rd century BC, the Arthashastra - an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft - was regulating a whole menu of liquors, taxes and all, including one listed simply as "spirit distilled from molasses."[source] So the honey-like reed, the fermented drink, and even something resembling a very early proto-rum, all show up in the historical record remarkably early. But we are still a very long way from modern rum.
It was the secret of granulated sugar, not alcohol, that traveled out of southeast Asia. In India, they discovered how to boil cane juice down into crystallized sugar - something sturdy enough to store, ship, and sell, rather than something you had to drink on the spot within earshot of the fields. That knowledge from India into Persia, then spread across the Islamic world and into the Mediterranean. But sugar took its time reaching Europe proper, and even once it arrived, it stayed a luxury for centuries - sold by the ounce alongside spices like pepper and cinnamon, not stocked in every kitchen the way it is now.[source]
Then came the Age of Exploration, and with it, an entirely new scale of ambition. Sugarcane was already growing on Spanish- and Portuguese-controlled islands off the coast of Africa - the Canaries, Madeira - so when European ships started crossing the Atlantic, cane came along almost as a matter of course. Columbus planted it on Hispaniola in 1493, during his second voyage. It was a modest start. What came next was not.
Photo by jaikishan patel on Unsplash
Portuguese Brazil is where sugar stopped being a garden crop and became an industry - the first place in the New World where production scaled up into a massive, slave-powered plantation system. By the 17th century, that same brutal model had spread across the Caribbean, to islands like Barbados and Jamaica, as European colonists seized land and forced millions of enslaved Africans into the grueling, often deadly work of planting, cutting, and processing cane.[source]
All that sugar came with a byproduct - and it turned out to be nearly as valuable as the sugar itself, if you knew what to do with it. As cane juice was boiled down and crystallized, it left behind a thick, dark syrup: molasses. On its own, molasses was worth less than refined sugar. But it was still loaded with fermentable sugars, and in the Caribbean, that sticky leftover became the raw material for an entirely new commodity in the Atlantic world: rum.
Rum was likely first distilled for local use by the enslaved population of Barbados, sometime around the 1650s.[source] But it didn't stay local for long. It was cheap, it was easy to ship, and - as colonists quickly figured out - it was extremely profitable. Sugar, and the rum made from its leftovers, were about to become two of the most valuable commodities in the entire Atlantic world.
That value didn't stay contained to the Caribbean for long. By the early 18th century, rum and molasses had become one leg of what's now known as the "triangular trade" - a brutal, three-way exchange linking Africa, the Caribbean, and the American colonies. New England distillers, especially in port cities like Boston and Newport, bought Caribbean molasses by the barrel and turned it into rum. That rum sailed to West Africa, where it was traded for enslaved men, women, and children. Those who made it across the Atlantic alive were sold into the plantation system on the Caribbean sugar islands, and put to work producing more sugar and molasses - closing the loop, and starting it right back up again.[source]
Rum became so central to the colonial economy that Britain moved to tax it - first with the Molasses Act of 1733, then the tougher Sugar Act of 1764. Colonial merchants simply smuggled around both. The resulting friction over sugar, rum, and taxation fed some of the same grievances that would eventually boil over into the American Revolution.[source]
It's a lot of history for a dessert, isn't it? An orchid painstakingly pollinated by hand. A bitter drink once reserved for Aztec nobility. A byproduct of one of the most brutal economic systems the Atlantic world ever built. None of that sounds like it belongs anywhere near a pie crust.
But that's exactly the thing about food: it never carries just flavor. It carries everywhere the flavor has been. Every cuisine on earth is, in some sense, a history book you can eat - a record of who grew what, who traded with whom, who was forced to labor for whom, and who eventually sat down together (or didn't) to share the results. Vanilla, chocolate, and rum happen to be an unusually vivid example of that. Trace any one of them back far enough, and you don't just find a plant: you find empires, ingenuity, exploitation, and, eventually, somebody's kitchen. That's not a reason to look away from where these ingredients came from. If anything, it's the opposite: paying attention to that history is part of what makes eating well feel like more than just eating.
And it's worth saying plainly - these are not humble ingredients. Real vanilla is still, to this day, pollinated one flower at a time, by hand, because we've never found a better way to do it. Chocolate was once valuable enough to spend like currency, and to this day requires a massive amount of labor to grow and process into bars and candy. Rum was born from a byproduct nobody thought was worth much, and turned into one of the most consequential commodities in Atlantic history. Put plainly, this pie is stacked with three of the most storied, labor-intensive, quietly luxurious ingredients in the human diet. And most of us keep them in the pantry without giving them a second thought!
So give them a second thought. Then preheat the oven.
Peaches have been cultivated by humans for thousands of years. Native to China, these members of the rose family have been grown (and eaten) since at least 7500 BC, according to archaeological evidence.[source] Over time, peaches traveled west through Central Asia to Persia, an association preserved in their botanical name, prunus persica. From Persia, they reached the Mediterranean world during the final centuries BC and eventually spread throughout Europe.
Spanish explorers and colonists brought peaches from the Old World to the Americas during the 1500s. By the early to mid-1600s, Native American communities were cultivating peaches and sharing their pits through established trade and social networks across the Southeast and beyond. Peach trees flower early and thrive in warm climates, making them particularly well suited to much of the South. They grew so readily that some have described them as spreading like weeds.[source]
In 1995, the peach was declared the official state fruit of Georgia, formalizing an association that had developed over more than a century. Georgia has never been the nation’s leading peach producer, nor have peaches formed the backbone of its agricultural economy. Instead, the state earned its reputation by developing successful new varieties and finding innovative ways to market and ship them across the country. Because Georgia’s peaches are also among the first domestically grown peaches to reach supermarkets each summer, they came to occupy an outsized place in the public imagination - earning Georgia the nickname "the Peach State" long before the peach received its official designation.
Peaches were common in Georgia long before it became a state, but they were not a major commercial crop during the antebellum period. Cotton dominated Georgia agriculture, while peaches were generally grown for local use and given relatively little economic value. The idea that Southern fruit growing could become a profitable industry was sometimes dismissed: Northern growers already controlled the established fruit market, while Southern farmers had neither a dependable market of their own nor an effective way to transport delicate, highly perishable fruit over long distances.[source]
And most importantly, why bother with a difficult-to-transport crop like peaches, when cotton was doing so well?
That said, there were a few early attempts. Georgia peaches reached New York as early as 1858, demonstrating that a Northern market existed.[source] Nevertheless, shipping them remained difficult and expensive, and there was not yet a concerted effort to turn peach growing into a major industry.
After the Civil War, however, Georgia's landowners faced an uncertain economic future. The cotton economy had been built upon slavery, and emancipation left them searching for new crops and new ways to make their land profitable. Fruit growing began to attract particular interest among affluent farmers, nurserymen, and advocates of scientific agriculture. For those who imagined a modern and prosperous "New South," the familiar peach took on new significance: with improved varieties, reliable transportation, and access to distant markets, it might become a valuable commercial crop.
One challenge stood in the way: peaches are delicate and highly perishable. Unlike apples, they could not easily withstand a long journey to market. That began to change in the 1870s, when Georgia horticulturist Samuel Henry Rumph developed the Elberta peach.
Large, attractive, and unusually firm, the Elberta peach could survive transportation better than many earlier varieties. In 1875, an experimental shipment reached New York in good condition and sold for an impressive price. It was proof that Georgia peaches could reach - and succeed in - the lucrative markets of the North.
Rumph then helped turn that experiment into an industry. He sold Elberta peach trees to other orchard owners and worked to improve the refrigerated railroad cars used to carry peaches over long distances. With a durable new variety, expanding rail connections, and refrigeration to slow spoilage, Georgia growers could finally send their fruit north in significant quantities. The Georgia peach was on its way from a locally grown fruit to a nationally recognized product.[source]
Arriving at the beginning of May, Georgia peaches became a hallmark of summer - an eagerly anticipated taste of warm weather. Growers built upon those appealing associations until the peach became part of Georgia's public identity. In 1922, Fort Valley, just eight miles from Samuel Rumph's hometown of Marshallville, held its first Peach Blossom Festival. The celebration was a spectacular success, reportedly drawing as many as 40,000 visitors. According to the City of Fort Valley, the festival was discontinued after 1926 because the crowds had grown too large for the community to accommodate. By then, however, the publicity had served another purpose: in 1924, the surrounding area was incorporated as Peach County, the last new county formed in Georgia. The festival tradition was revived in the 1980s, and Peach County continues to host the Georgia Peach Festival today.[source] Across the state, meanwhile, the peach appeared in advertising, festivals, tourism campaigns, music, artwork, souvenirs, and even on Georgia license plates.
Nowadays, California grows more peaches. But no other state created such a powerful cultural story and image around the fruit. When Georgia declared the peach its official state fruit in 1995, the law did not create that association; it simply recognized a cultural phenomenon already more than a century in the making.
Georgia’s official state dessert, however, is not peach pie. Georgia chose peach cobbler. The state that ultimately laid claim to peach pie was - perhaps unexpectedly - Delaware.
In 1875, when Samuel Rumph sent his first shipment of Elberta peaches north, he was competing against the fruit-growers of Delaware. At that time, Delaware was the leading producer of peaches in the United States, producing and shipping 6 million baskets at its peak.[source]
That 6 million figure is from the bill which made Peach Pie Delaware's State Dessert, in 2009. A more contemporary account - the proceedings of the American Pomological Society in 1877 - put the number of baskets shipped from Delaware and Maryland together at 7-8 million baskets.[source] We don't know exactly how big a Delaware peach basket was, and we don't know exactly what the breakdown was between Delaware and Maryland. But given that Delaware was the larger peach producing state, the 6 million basket figure isn't unreasonable. And even with a conservative estimate of a half-bushel (approximately 24 pounds), that would put their peach production at 72,000 tons - more than Georgia or South Carolina (the 3rd and 2nd biggest peach producing states in the country now) produce today.
Delaware's peach orchards owed their success to two things: local horticulturalists had done a great deal of work with various grafting techniques (specifically "budding") resulting in consistent fruit quality, and Delaware had the riverways - and later railroads - to take their fruit crop up to the big cities like Philadelphia and New York.[source]
By the 1890's, there were over 4 million peach trees in Delaware, and the peach blossom was adopted as Delaware's state flower.[source] In the words of a journalist of the time, R. J. Burdette, speaking about Middletown, Delaware at the height of the peach industry:
When the peach season is at its height Middletown never rests and never goes to bed, but spends its time in shipping peaches to an eager and peachless world.[source]
But tragically, the 1890's were also the beginning of the end for the Delaware peach industry. After decades of growing their peach orchards ever larger, the trees were hit with two diseases known as the "peach yellows" and "little peach," respectively. Both diseases affected the quality of the fruit, and either killed the tree, or required it to be destroyed to stop the spread of the disease.
Between the disease and the slow exhaustion of the soil from decades of peach-growing, the peach industry in Delaware shrank. By the 1920's, there were only 300,000 peach trees left in Delaware. Fruit growers switched to other, more reliable, fruit crops, and Delaware's peach industry became a footnote in history.
In 2009, the peach pie was made the state's official state dessert not because peaches are meaningful to Delaware's economy in the 21st century, but to commemorate their heyday in the 19th century. And, because, in the words of the school children who pushed for the bill in the first place, peach pie is "delicious, gooey, good anytime of the day, and easy to make fresh." Yes, they got the word "gooey" into official legislation. Well done.
Of course, when the hot days of summer come around in Illinois, we aren't waiting for Georgia or Delaware peaches, but the sweet peaches of Southern Illinois. Those local peaches are always the juiciest and most fragrant, and arrive sometime around July. Around here, the local supermarket always carries Eckert's Farm peaches but there are many peach orchards in the hills of southern Illinois, and have been since the 19th century.
A ripe peach is already nearly perfect on its own: fragrant, dripping with juice, and best eaten over the sink. But when peach season arrives and there are plenty of peaches on the counter, some of them are inevitably destined for pie.
This deep-dish peach pie makes the most of that brief summer abundance. The peaches are brightened with a little orange and ginger, then piled generously into a buttery gluten-free crust and baked until the filling bubbles and the pastry turns golden. Serve it warm with vanilla ice cream, or let it cool completely for firmer, neater slices. Either way, this is the pie to make while the summer peaches are here.
Despite its name, the Dutch baby as we know it is an American dish. It is most closely associated with Manca's Cafe, a family-owned restaurant in Seattle that became famous for serving small, dramatically puffed pancakes during the first half of the twentieth century.
According to the history preserved by the Manca family, restaurant owner Victor Manca developed the dish, and one of his daughters may have given it the name "Dutch baby." The explanation is that "Dutch" is the child's mispronunciation of Deutsch (i.e. German).[source] It is a charming story, though the exact details are difficult to confirm this many years later.
Manca's may have coined the name and popularized its own version, but the general idea of an oven-baked puffy pancake was already in circulation. Victor Hirtzler included a recipe simply called "German Pancake" in the 1919 edition of The Hotel St. Francis Cook Book. The recipe goes as follows:
German pancakes. Two eggs, one-half cup of milk, one-half cup of flour, a pinch of salt, a little nutmeg and one teaspoonful of sugar. Mix well. Have a large frying pan ready with hot butter. Be sure and have the butter run all over the inside of the pan so the pancake will not stick to the sides when it rises. Pour in the batter and place in oven. When nearly done, powder with sugar and put back in oven to brown. Serve with lemon and powdered sugar.[source]
A familiar formula, right?
So why the name "German pancake"? Many sources - including the Manca family - suggest that it was inspired by the German Pfannkuchen. That may be true, though traditional Pfannkuchen are usually cooked on the stovetop and look more like what Americans would call crepes.[source]
In practice, the Dutch baby has just as much in common with a popover or Yorkshire pudding. All three begin with a thin, egg-heavy batter, and rise dramatically in the oven before sinking again as they cool. The Dutch baby is essentially the sweeter, larger member of that same wonderfully puffy family of baked goods.
Whatever its exact ancestry, the dish that came out of Seattle became something distinctly American: part pancake, part popover, and impressive enough to make an ordinary breakfast feel like a special occasion.
This gluten-free flatbread recipe makes a great gluten-free deep dish pizza crust - no modifications needed!
I searched for years for a good gluten-free pizza dough recipe. The default is usually thin crust, and don’t get me wrong: I love a good thin crust pizza. But there is something so satisfying about a thick, doughy pizza crust, slathered in tomato sauce and covered with cheese and toppings. I tried different gluten-free pizza dough recipes for years, but most of them turned out just... okay.
This dough makes an actually good 12" pizza crust.
To use it for pizza, mix the dough as directed. Instead of dividing it into individual portions, roll the whole batch into one large round. I usually make a nice thick 12-inch crust, but you can roll it thinner if you prefer.
Lightly oil your pizza pan with olive oil, then transfer the dough to the pan and bake for 20 minutes at 400°F. At this point, the crust will be partially baked, but not finished. Add your sauce, cheese, and desired toppings, then return the pizza to the oven for another 10 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and golden.
This gluten-free sourdough flatbread is one of those practical recipes that earns its place in the kitchen. It is quick enough to make without planning ahead, flexible enough to fold around eggs, falafel, or gyro fillings, and flavorful enough to eat warm from the pan with butter or ghee. And if you have a little extra time, the dough only gets better with a short rest or an overnight ferment in the refrigerator.
It is also wonderfully adaptable. Cook a few rounds for lunch, save the rest of the dough for tomorrow, or roll the whole batch into a thick, satisfying gluten-free pizza crust. However you use it, this recipe is a simple way to turn sourdough discard and whole grain flours into something warm, useful, and genuinely delicious.
In the USA, the word biscuit usually brings to mind a round, soft, buttery quick bread. American biscuits are made by cutting butter into flour, then using baking powder or baking soda to help them rise. But that is not the universal meaning of the word. Biscuit comes from the French bescuit, which in turn came from the Latin biscoctum, which means "twice baked."[source] The original biscuit was a hard, crunchy bread that had been baked twice to dry it out and help it keep longer - not the tender, fluffy American biscuit we know today. That older meaning is still closer to the way the word is used in the UK, where biscuit usually refers to a crisp cookie.
Biscuits came to the American colonies as hardtack: hard "ship’s biscuits" baked until dry enough to survive a long voyage. They were useful, portable, and practical, but not exactly the kind of bread anyone was excited to pull warm from the oven. Once the colonies were more established, biscuits began to change. Cooks added butter or lard, making them richer, and developed "beaten biscuits," which were beaten by hand to work air into the dough.
That process could take an hour or more, and the results were still flatter and more cracker-like than the biscuits we know today. Because they required so much labor, beaten biscuits were most common in households with plenty of kitchen help, and fresh morning biscuits became something of a status symbol.[source]
The real turning point came in the mid-1800s, with the rise of chemical leaveners. Baking soda was used starting in the 1830's, and by the 1850's the soda had been further stabilized and was being sold as something closer to modern baking powder. Those leaveners were the final puzzle piece, allowing biscuits to become lighter, fluffier, and much closer to the tender quick bread we mean when we say "biscuit" today.[source]
Gluten-free sourdough discard biscuits are one of my favorite ways to turn extra starter into something warm, buttery, and genuinely useful. They are quick enough for breakfast, hearty enough for dinner, and close enough to a classic American biscuit that you do not feel like you are settling for the gluten-free version.
Now all that is left is to bake a batch. Head back up to the recipe card and get those biscuits in the oven, or keep scrolling for more gluten-free sourdough recipes to try.
It takes a bit of time, after all, to maintain a sourdough starter and regularly bake fresh bread. Which raises the question - is all this effort worth it?
I make bread every few days, so of course my answer is an enthusiastic yes. While gluten free options are becoming more common all the time - in supermarkets, and even in the occasional dedicated gluten-free bakery - many of these options suffer from the same issues. So many store-bought gluten free breads are overly dry, crumbly, or stale tasting. They are serviceable when toasted, buttered, or used as sandwich bread. But on their own, they leave a great deal to be desired.
The reason for this is that most of these store-bought gluten free breads are made primarily from starch, not whole grain flour. Presumably they do this to mimic white wheated bread, but the end result is not remotely similar. And it is probably not very good for you either.
So the solution is to make your own bread.
In addition to being able to use good quality whole grain flour in your bread, baking at home lets you take advantage of the magic of fermentation. During that long, slow rise, the yeasts and bacteria in the starter begin working on the flour before the loaf ever reaches the oven. They create the tangy flavor and aroma we associate with sourdough, while also breaking down some of the more complex parts of the grain.
That slow breakdown is part of what makes sourdough different from a quickly mixed loaf. Fermentation essentially gives digestion a head start, making some of the nutrients in the flour more available in the finished bread. Micronutrients such as calcium, sodium, zinc, and magnesium are present in many flours, including gluten-free ones, but are not always easy for the body to extract. FODMAPs - a type of carbohydrate some people have trouble digesting - are also broken down in the fermentation process, meaning that sourdough bread is less likely to cause bloating.[source] In other words, sourdough does not just taste nicer; the fermentation process unlocks the nutritional potential of your loaf.
Sourdough bread is not naturally gluten free. Traditional sourdough bread is usually made with wheat flour, and wheat contains gluten. Fermentation may change the digestibility of bread, but it does not make a regular wheat sourdough loaf safe for someone with celiac disease or a serious gluten intolerance.
That is why this recipe starts with gluten-free flours and a gluten-free sourdough starter. You still get the flavor and benefits of a long, slow fermentation - the tangy flavor, the better texture, the wonderful fresh-bread smell - without relying on wheat. It is not about making wheat sourdough "safe." It is about building a naturally fermented loaf from gluten-free ingredients from the beginning.
And that, to me, is the real virtue of homemade gluten-free sourdough. You get to choose whole grain flours, avoid the starch-heavy loaves from the grocery store, and create something that actually feels like bread again: crusty, flavorful, nourishing, and worth slicing warm from the pan.
Once you have a healthy starter going, bread is only the beginning. That same tangy, bubbly starter can be used in all sorts of gluten-free bakes, from flatbread to biscuits and beyond.
In order to make anything sourdough, you first need a sourdough starter. A starter is a simple mixture of flour and water that captures wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria, creating the natural fermentation that gives sourdough its tangy flavor and gentle rise. Once active, it can be added to gluten-free breads, pancakes, biscuits, flatbreads, and more, bringing both flavor and some of the nutritional benefits of fermentation.
The basic process is simple: mix flour and water in a clean jar, then let it rest on your countertop in a warm spot out of direct sunlight. Each day, discard about half of the starter and feed what remains with fresh flour and water. After a few days, you should begin to see bubbles, and after about a week, your starter should be active enough to use in your first gluten-free sourdough recipes.
As long as you keep a sourdough starter, you need to keep feeding it. Feeding simply means giving the wild yeasts and bacteria fresh flour and water so they have something new to eat. A healthy starter will keep bubbling, rising, and developing flavor as long as it is fed regularly.
The more starter you keep, the more flour it will need. This is why most sourdough instructions tell you to discard part of the starter before each feeding. Discarding keeps the amount manageable, so you are not feeding a larger and larger jar of starter every day (and thus using more and more flour). You can throw the discard away, or add it to baked goods like pancakes, flatbread or biscuits. These "discard" recipes are not fermented, but they reduce wasted flour.
For a gluten-free starter, the flour you choose matters. Most whole grain gluten-free flours can be used, but they each behave a little differently. Some have a stronger flavor, or different texture or color. I have personally tried brown rice flour, white rice flour, sorghum flour, teff flour, and buckwheat flour, and each one has its own personality.
Below are my notes on the flours I have used, what I liked about them, and where they worked best in a gluten-free sourdough starter.
Brown rice flour is a staple in my gluten-free baking. It gives the starter yeasts and bacteria enough nutrition to stay active, but it is still mild and easy to bake with. I think of it as a good baseline flour for a gluten-free starter.
White rice flour is milder and starchier than brown rice flour. I have mostly used it when I wanted a lighter-colored starter for recipes like sourdough Christmas cookies. It is pale and slightly gummy, and in my experience, it does not seem to rise quite as quickly as some whole grain flours.
Buckwheat flour is traditionally used in fermented foods, but I found that it behaved oddly in my starter. It gave the mixture a stretchy texture and a pinkish cast. The texture was not a problem, but the color looked uncomfortably close to bad bacterial growth, so I stopped using buckwheat in my starter.
Sorghum flour is one of my go-to options for feeding a gluten-free starter. It is a solid whole grain flour that keeps the starter active without adding an overpowering flavor. One of my favorite starter combinations is a 50/50 split of sorghum flour and teff flour.
Teff flour is a standout in terms of nutrition, and it is one of my favorite flours to use in both starter and baking. It is a dark flour, so it will give your starter a brown tint. That works beautifully in bread, though I have been less pleased with it in lighter recipes like cookies or biscuits, where I want a softer flavor and color.
One small oddity with teff: when a teff based starter gets hungry, it burbles out black or dark grey liquid. This looks very disconcerting, but don't worry! Its not any strange growth, just the tint from the flour.
For more information on the various gluten free flours, check out my flour and baking guides.
Just because you start with one flour, or one combination of flours, does not mean you have to use it forever. Sourdough starter is flexible, and it will gradually adjust to whatever you feed it.
For instance, you might begin with a sorghum and brown rice flour combination, then later decide that teff or white rice flour works better for the recipes you want to make. Or you may want a darker, heartier starter for bread and a lighter starter for cookies or holiday baking. Adapting your starter is simple: just begin feeding it with the new flour.
Over the course of a few days of feeding and discarding, the starter will begin to take on the character of its new flour base. I have changed my starter from rice-based, to sorghum-based, to teff-based. I have also taken part of an active starter and used it to create a separate white rice starter for holiday baking. The only real caveat is that the starter needs a few days to adjust, so plan ahead if you want to use it in a specific recipe.
So, what happens if you forget to feed your starter?
Terrible, awful things. Enter: mold and bad bacteria.
Forgetting to feed your starter for one day is usually not a big deal. It may separate a bit, develop a layer of liquid on top, or bubble sullenly at you from the jar. Just stir it back together, discard a portion, feed it again, and it should recover.
The bigger problems begin when a starter is neglected for several days, especially while it is still young. When a starter is healthy and well fed, the good yeasts and bacteria help keep the mixture acidic and active. When those microbes are underfed and weak, unwanted growth has a much better chance of taking over. An older, established starter may give you more room for error, but any starter with visible mold, fuzzy growth, pink or orange streaks, or a truly rotten smell should be thrown away. The smell is an especially good indicator of the health of your starter. If it stops smelling like food, and starts smelling foul, toss it.
What kind of mold or bacterial growth appears will depend on your kitchen environment. I once lost two starters to a pinkish growth that smelled vaguely like bad cheese. The first time, my starter was a few months old and I had no backup in the fridge, so I had to throw the whole thing out and start again.
The wisdom of the internet suggested that I may have been dealing with serratia marcescens, a pink-colored bacteria that likes damp environments. Since that same bacteria is often found in the dark corners of bathrooms, I decided not to play games with it. Its best to be safe in anything involving fermentation - when in doubt, throw it out.
Sourdough starter takes a week to be ready to bake with, but many weeks (if not months or years) to achieve the best flavor and rise. You'll see bakeries bragging about how they have twenty year old starters - or older! In general, the older the starter, the better it is. So while you can always start over, the goal is to keep your starter healthy and happy for the long haul.
Your starter will grow and mature the fastest at room temperature, or slightly above. That means leaving it on the counter (or unheated oven) and feeding it every day - if not twice a day. But while this is the best way to get your starter into top form, it is also where your starter has the most chance to go bad. So to protect your starter, make sure to always use distilled water. You don't want to introduce new bacteria into your starter that the good yeasts aren't prepared to fight. Nor do you want to kill your yeasts with chlorine from the tap. Distilled water is pure and unproblematic.
In addition, make sure to clean your container at least once a week. Bits of extra flour and starter inevitably end up smeared all the way to the rim of any container, no matter how well you scrape it down every feeding. Those bits of flour are separated from the main body of the yeasts, and so more vulnerable to mold. Moving your starter into a new clean and sterilized container keeps everything healthy.
As you can see, starter maintenance takes regular care. But life happens. Vacations happen. It is not always feasible (or economical) to keep your starter fed for months on end of maximal growth. Fortunately, yeasts go dormant when exposed to cold. The refrigerator and freezer are your best friends in preserving your starter.
Once your starter is old enough to use - so at least a week old - you can put it in the fridge at any time. This will slow down its growth, meaning you only have to feed it once a week (if that, I've left mine for as long as two weeks and still been able to wake it). This keeps it from going bad just because life got in the way of feeding it for a few days.
The only disadvantage of using the refrigerator to preserve your starter is that you will need to "wake it up" every time you want to bake. This means taking the starter out, putting it in a warm place, and feeding it to get the fermentation started again. After a few hours (~4ish, depending on how warm it is), your starter will be active and rising again, though you may need to wait longer for it to rise and be in peak baking condition.
Essentially, you will need to plan ahead every time you want to bake with starter from the fridge. But that is often a reasonable price to pay for keeping your unique colony of wild yeasts healthy.
Once you have a starter you are happy with, consider freezing a little as a backup. The freezer is one of the easiest ways to preserve sourdough starter long-term, since the cold slows the yeasts and bacteria down so much that they can rest there for months, or even longer.
To freeze your starter, portion it out first instead of freezing one large blob. I like using a silicon disk mold for this because the starter freezes into neat little portions that are easy to pop out and store. Once the disks are fully frozen, move them into a labeled freezer bag or reusable silicone bag so you know exactly what they are and when you froze them.
To revive frozen starter, take out 1-2 disks and let them thaw in a clean glass jar. Once thawed, feed the starter the same way you would feed a fresh starter. After about three days of regular feeding, it should be bubbly, active, and ready to use again.
Once your gluten-free sourdough starter is active, it becomes a little kitchen companion you can keep feeding, adapting, and using in all kinds of baking. But the natural first step is bread.
A good gluten-free sourdough loaf lets you see what your starter can really do: add tangy flavor, improve texture, and bring more depth to whole grain gluten-free flour. If your starter is bubbly and rising between feedings, try it first in my gluten-free sourdough bread recipe.
Then, once your starter is established and you have extra discard to work with, you can branch out into quicker recipes. Sourdough discard is perfect for gluten-free flatbreads, biscuits, pancakes, crackers, and other simple bakes where you want sourdough flavor without waiting on a full loaf of bread.
My family is gluten free for health reasons, so I am always happy when a recipe is naturally gluten free from the start. This one is exactly that: no special substitutions, no complicated swaps, just sugar, water, egg whites, and vanilla doing what they were meant to do.
It is also naturally dairy free, which is what first drew me to Italian meringue a few years ago. For a stretch of time, I needed to avoid dairy while nursing my baby daughter, and between that and our usual gluten-free baking, dessert started to feel a little complicated. Finding a frosting that was naturally both gluten free and dairy free felt like a real win, and this one has stayed a favorite ever since.
At its heart, meringue is a simple idea: whipped egg whites and sugar. And while electric mixers have certainly made life easier, dedicated cooks were beating egg whites by hand long before modern meringue ever got its name.
In al-Warraq's The Book of Dishes from 10th century Baghdad there is a mention of a candy recipe called Harrani Natif. This recipe involved heated honey, beaten egg whites, spices, and the chef's choice of dried fruits or nut additions. In the translation of the recipe by Muna Salloum and Leila Salloum Elias the basic steps of heating sugar (or honey in this case), and then cooking and whipping eggs whites is very reminiscent of modern swiss meringue or nougat. And the final instruction really puts into perspective what it was like to make egg white based recipes before the invention of the modern electric whisk, as al-Warraq explains,
"The amount of time needed to beat it is three hours until it firms up, God willing."[source]
Needless to say, this was a candy for Caliphs, Kings, and nobles. The technique was popular enough, however, that it eventually made it from Baghdad to Europe and, by the 16th century, had informed the development of the Spanish Turrón and Italian Torrone, which are both similar nougat-like candies.
By the early 1600s, we can see a very recognizable meringue ancestor appear in European cookbooks. In 1604, Lancelot de Casteau included a recipe for neige sèche, or "dry snow," in his Ouverture de Cuisine. This "dry snow" was a cooked meringue, quite similar to Italian meringue, though flavored with rose water and spices.[source] De Casteau described it as cream-like, which suggests a texture not unlike the Italian meringue we know today, though it was served on its own rather than used as a frosting. De Casteau served as chef to several bishops of Liège in present-day Belgium, and wrote his cookbook near the end of his career, likely recording recipes he had been preparing for many years.
That same year, an English meringue ancestor appears in Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book under the name "white bisket bread," made with sugar, flour, and egg whites. An interesting thing about Fettiplace's Receipt Book is that it was not, in fact, published in her lifetime or necessarily meant to be. Instead, it was a family cookbook which was passed along to Fettiplace's niece, and only published by her family in 1986.[source] Fettiplace herself came from an upper-class family, but she was not necessarily the "inventor" of the recipes she recorded. As with so many old cookbooks, she was likely writing down a preparation that had already been made in England, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe, for quite some time.
The word meringue itself does not appear in print until later in the seventeenth century, most commonly tied to François Massialot's 1692 cookbook, Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs et les fruits.[source] Massialot was something of a celebrity chef in his day, who worked for the Duke of Orleans and planned dinners at Versailles. But we do not know if he gave meringues their name - the origin of the word is murky, even if the technique itself was well known in the 17th century.
However uncertain the origin of the name, the appeal of meringue is wonderfully clear. It takes a few humble ingredients and turns them into something light, elegant, and unexpectedly special. If you are looking for a frosting that feels lighter than buttercream, a little more elegant, and naturally fits both gluten-free and dairy-free baking, Italian meringue is your answer. It takes a bit of attention, but the process is far more approachable than it first appears. And your reward is a delicious pillowy swirl of marshmallowy goodness.
Chocolate cake has a way of marking the moments that matter, from celebrations to quiet evenings at home. Making it from scratch brings a level of care and intention that is hard to replicate any other way. With the right ingredients and a thoughtful approach, you can create a cake that is every bit as rich, soft, and satisfying as any wheat-based cake. You don't have to sacrifice on flavor or texture, just because you are gluten-free.
Sugar Cream or Hoosier pie comes from the Midwest, and is often credited to the Shaker or Amish communities in Indiana. The oldest known recipe purports to be from 1816 - which is also, incidentally, the year Indiana became a state - but perhaps it was being made even before then.[source]
The pie is traditionally made with ingredients that would have been common in a farm pantry in the 19th century: milk or cream, sugar, and maybe eggs. The eggs are actually a very controversial ingredient; the traditional sugar cream pie is a very simple mix of cream, flour, and sugar which you mix up with your hands in the pie plate itself to avoid whipping the cream (hence another name, "Finger Pie"). The addition of eggs makes it into more of a custard pie - which is delicious, but a slightly different thing.
Because sugar cream pie is made from simple pantry ingredients, it is often grouped with what are now called “desperation pies.” These are pies that rely on staples like sugar, dairy, and eggs rather than seasonal ingredients such as fresh fruit. They became especially common in times and places where access to fresh produce was limited, whether due to season, geography, or economic constraint.[source]
The term itself is modern, but it reflects a very real pattern in traditional cooking: making something satisfying from what was readily available. In that context, "desperation pies" offered a way to create a dessert without relying on ingredients that were not always accessible.
Of course, today we have year-round access to fresh and frozen fruit, and good cream is often one of the more expensive ingredients in this recipe. Still, the idea behind the pie remains compelling. It is a reminder that simple ingredients, used well, can produce something rich, comforting, and enduring.
Among the many names for sugar cream pie is the rather curious moniker "Hoosier Pie." The name points directly to its Indiana origins, where the dessert has long been a staple and a point of local pride.
But what, exactly, is a Hoosier?
Today, the answer is simple: a Hoosier is a resident of Indiana. The term has been in common use since at least the early 1800s and is now the official demonym for the state. Indiana residents have embraced it so fully that it appears everywhere, from university teams to everyday conversation.[source]
Where the word came from, however, is much less certain.
The first written instances of the word Hoosier crop up in the 1830's, and almost immediately after, people began asking the question of where the odd word had come from. They didn't know back then either, but some entertaining possibilities were suggested. One such possibility was that it came from the phrase "Who’s here?" shouted between cabins. Another was that it referred to the pugnacious nature of Indiana rivermen, who were so good at fighting and shutting up anyone who offended them that they became "Hushers" and then that term turned into Hoosier.
A slightly more serious etymological suggestion is that the word is related to the old English word "hoo" which meant "hill." In other words, that it started as a reference to "hill people" living in Appalachia, and then, as those people moved down into the Midwest, was applied to their descendants living in Indiana.[source]
In the end, no one knows for certain. What began as a mysterious nickname has become a badge of identity, and in the case of sugar cream pie, a reminder of the region where the dish took root.
Given its deep roots in the region, it is no surprise that sugar cream pie is widely considered the unofficial state pie of Indiana. While there was an effort in 2009 to formally recognize it, the bill ultimately did not pass.[source] Even so, the association has endured, and websites like visitindiana.com refers to it as the state’s "official unofficial" pie.
In practice, the distinction hardly matters. Sugar cream pie has been part of Indiana’s culinary identity for generations, long before any formal designation was proposed. It is a pie tied to place, to history, and to the habits of everyday kitchens.
From its roots as a pantry-based dessert to its place as a Midwestern classic, sugar cream pie reflects a way of cooking that values simplicity and resourcefulness. It does not rely on elaborate ingredients or complicated technique, but instead on doing a few things well.
That same idea carries through to the gluten-free version. With good ingredients and a careful approach, the result is just as rich, smooth, and satisfying as any traditional pie.
