Choux pastry, general questions with gluten free flour

Question

I have a few questions regarding choux (cream puff pastry) and gluten free flour. After trying a few different recipes with a huge range of butter/ flour ratios, I settled with this one

https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/choux-pastry-recipe-easy/

So far they always rose nicely and I never had a problem. But when I switched to gluten free flour, each time I got a different result with the same flour. Sometimes they rose, sometimes I had only really small air bubbles inside. Once the dough got so sticky I had problems getting it off the spoon (I just made/ dropped them as small sticky hills ~3cm wide and they turned out great). Since I'm almost sure to always use the same amount and brand of ingredients, there has to be a step in between that affects the result.

• Duration with heat while stirring the flour into the mix. The dough forms within 20 sec after dumping it in and mixing (as well with covering the bottom of the pot), is longer stirring affecting the result? (Less water in dough, less steam in oven?)
• I dump the steaming mix into stand mixer on a low setting and don't add eggs one by one before the mix stops steaming. Can gluten free dough be over beaten?
• Usually I'm too lazy to pipe them and just form a ball by hand or use an ice cream scooper to form them. All forms had high and low rising results, but can one type give a better result or is it more an optical result? (Piped looked always nicest to the eye but made the most mess for cleaning)
• The oven is usually around 200-210 with 20-25 min baking and another 5 min of resting time inside with turned off heat. Does upper/ lower heat vs fan makes a difference?

Answer 1

I would suggest piping your dough.

Also, be sure your oven is thoroughly preheated, and you'll have much better results using a pizza stone or oven steel. I would suggest baking in the middle of the oven on only one layer (don't use two racks at once). Preheat the oven to about 15°C hotter than you are going to bake and then turn it down to baking temp as soon as you put in your puffs. Use the fan (convection) setting if your oven has one. You probably want to use about 15°C lower temperature with a fan than the recipe states unless it specifies with fan.

My recommendation is put your dough on a piece of parchment paper on a flat metal tray, then slide the whole piece of parchment paper onto the stone/steel (like you were using a pizza peel).

Just for fun: it's called choux because the puffs look like little cabbages (choux in French).

Answer 2

In a pizza making class I took once, in NY, a person asked "what advice to you have for gluten free crusts" The teacher said "don't do it"...

basically, gluten is a very important part of flour from most aspects of baking, and forgoing it makes life a lot harder. But, I understand, some people have reasons.

I would say this, yes, you can over beat choux, undoubtable. 2 cooking for too long when you first dump in the flour can have a huge impact. You are right, its about the water in the pastry available to steam.

Then, yes, piping will give you better results. All of these things introduce variables, and I think flour with gluten is just more forgiving so you are not noticing the differing results as much. Take out that gluten, and you need to get it perfect.

on temp, my experience has been higher temp, no fan. Higher temp helps it steam more quickly, I find that fan tends to start drying and even blackening the outside before my inside is done.