Gluten-Free Baking: Recipes from the Famed Chambelland Bakers of Paris

This book is very disappointing for the following reasons:1. Half of the book is a promotion for Chambelland flour, literally!2. The recipes are basic. These guys act as if years of GF rice flour baking never existed. It was a revelation to them and based on their results they still are in the dark about so many GF baking techniques using rice flour that give outstanding results.3. Their pics of baked goods look like they burn everything they bake.4. Most recipes are for cake pan bread loafs that look dense. They actually talk about how the results be dense.5. Their main bread form is a slab of bread. This is exactly what people who bake GF do not want. We want breads of regular shapes and sizes, and textures.6. Even their cookies looked terrible. This book left me without a hint of wanting to try out its recipes.7. They warn you that their bread is artisan bread and you need experience to get their results. Well, I guess they are not aware that many new GF books make bread baking with great results available to even rookie bakers.Pros1. Good if you want to learn about how they source their rice. How they mill their rice.2. Nice pics of lovely places in Europe.3. There is a squid ink recipe that looks cool.4. Pricey. You pay a lot for half the book being an ad for their product.I have baked GF for many years and find this book underwhelming. Will send back.

I have waited for this book for a long time and I suppose I had high expectations. The first thing that struck me was the French Sourdough recipe uses fresh yeast but no actual sourdough starter? Why call the recipe French Sourdough without Sourdough? I also quickly found another copy editing error where baking powder was listed twice in a recipe. The cake recipes use Chambelland’s own flour blend which cannot be found in US. I feel like this book is poorly edited. The recipe writing is very vague and overall the book feels rather empty. Disappointing.

Well, if you’re going make a book on gluten-free bread, making do not use photographs of wheat dough. And make sure your proofreader pulls out any words that contain the word “whole wheat.”I was curious about this book because it got some headway, but I think everybody has now realized it just sucks. The recipes are total amateur recipe development. The bread is gummy in the photographs and does not look edible. And they have the nerve to use a photograph of wheat dough.