Vinegar For Gluten Free Pastry | Ask Nigella.com (2024)

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Vinegar For Gluten Free Pastry | Ask Nigella.com? ›

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What does that vinegar do? The most common answer — that it affects gluten development — isn't actually that useful. If you had a mass spectrometer at home, you could measure the teensy difference vinegar makes in the tensile strength of gluten strands in the dough, which in theory makes it a bit more tender.

Vinegar helps with creating a tender and moist crumb

But it's not just about the rise! Vinegar also helps in creating a tender and moist crumb in our baked goods. This is because the acidity of vinegar interferes with gluten development.

What does vinegar do to pastry dough? One ingredient that you can add to a pie crust that is a little more unusual is vinegar. Vinegar helps tenderize pie dough because it slightly inhibits gluten development, leading to a crust that is flakier and easier to work with.

The acidic properties of vinegar inhibit gluten, some will say. This theory proposes that once the water and flour are combined, gluten starts forming, causing the dough to grow tough. Adding an acid, the theory goes, stops the gluten in its tracks and rescues the crust from toughness.

Most vinegars are gluten-free. Most varieties are distilled and made from inherently gluten-free ingredients such as grapes. The only vinegar that needs to be avoided is malt vinegar. Malt vinegar is not distilled, and malt is derived from barley, a grain that is not gluten-free.

Any good pie crust recipe is about controlling that gluten development. “The fat coats the proteins and prevents gluten formation,” Sharma says of Parks's technique of using a higher ratio of butter and squashing it into large pieces (instead of pea-size ones).

Ice Water/Vinegar Mixture: Adding an acid to the dough creates a more tender crust. I use white vinegar for this recipe but you can substitute it with apple cider vinegar, lemon juice or vodka.

Rice wine vinegar doesn't have a strong taste so it is useful for this dough, but it can be replaced with other acids. Our preference would be to use fresh lemon juice as an alternative as it will not affect the flavour of the crust.

Lemon Juice

Lemon juice is my go-to fruit juice apple cider vinegar substitute. It can add lemony flavor to your recipe, even in amounts as small as a tablespoon.

What is the secret to a flaky crust? ›

Cold butter is the key to flaky crusts. Do not skip this step. You must put your butter in the freezer to get it nice and cold. Many people do not like working with frozen butter, but it makes all the difference in the world when you create your pie dough.

There are two key elements to promoting the extensibility necessary in the dough: adding vinegar to the dough, which weakens some of the gluten bonding, making it less elastic; and ample resting. Of course, it takes practice, just like working with any kind of dough.

When you add vinegar to the dough, the acetic acid reacts with the carbohydrates in the dough to form lactic acid. Lactic acid is less acidic than acetic acid, which means that adding vinegar to the dough reduces the acidity of the dough. This, in turn, speeds up the fermentation process.

Apple cider vinegar and white vinegar make good substitutes for one another in most cooking applications, but the former is significantly more tart. In many cases, you can also use these vinegars as substitutes for other types of vinegar.

Ideally, you'd use another type of vinegar to replace ACV as they also contain acetic acid. White vinegar makes a great replacement for apple cider vinegar as it has a neutral flavour profile. This means it shouldn't affect the flavour of your final bake, compared to if you'd used ACV.

When baking soda is combined with acid, CO2 gas bubbles are released, creating the “airy” effect in batter and dough. Furthermore, once the dough or batter starts to bake, the carbon dioxide will begin to filter through the dough and expand air that is trapped inside.

When you mix batter made with cake flour rather than all-purpose, less protein is present; as a result, the batter will develop less gluten. Bread flour, on the other hand, has a protein percentage of 12.7%. Because there's more protein present, the dough is capable of developing more gluten.

Too much water makes pie crusts tough, ESPECIALLY gluten-free crusts. An extra tablespoon or two can make your crust rock hard. Try to use the least amount of water listed.

The key to standard pie crust is having pockets of fat surrounded by flour. But if that fat starts to melt and mixes with the flour, it can start to develop gluten, which can lead to a tough crust.