This week we had the honor of making a birthday cake for Natasha, who is a horse-person. She doesn’t usually get bakery cakes ’cause she has some pretty specific needs — no gluten, no dairy, no soy, no nuts, no artificial food colorings. She likes blues and greens, she said, so thought we’d do a like a pasture, with a pond…

This is the blue and the green from the natural food coloring. The blue, of course, makes sense because it’s made from blueberries which aren’t really blue at all, but the green is a real disappointment. Read the rest of this entry »

We feel like we’ve just won the lottery! This is unbelievable. This November, Los Angeles Magazine’s Food Lover’s Guide features “Local Heroes,” sourcing the best locally produced food.

On page 151, “Toasts of the Town,” there’s a list of nine bakeries with photos of nine “of our favorite loaves” and — what’s that at the top of the page? “Divinely gluten free”!?! OUR FOCACCIA!?!

And just look at who else is on that list - Le Pain Quotidien, BreadBar, La Maison du Pain…. These are prestigious bakeries! (Actually, the woman from La Maison du Pain visited us one day. She’s very sweet - and it turns out she also bakes for Sophie’s Produce — she makes the little rolls for their non-gf sandwiches. Small world.)

Honestly; it’s only luck that we were even considered for such a list. I’m sure it’s just that they wanted to include a gluten-free option, and it had to be local, and we’re the only gluten-free bakery within 200 miles. But still, what luck! Thank God! And thank you, Margot - may you have a long and satisfying life! {Amen!}

by Sandee on 6/27/07 [Edited later a little.]

Download the podcast of last Saturday’s Good Food radio show, where they interviewed Eugenie about gluten-free baking and The Sensitive Baker!! Yay! Thank you SO much, everyone at KCRW! You have no idea how many people you sent our way!

We knew they taped it, obviously, but not when they would air it, that’s why I didn’t alert you to listen for it. But if you missed it, you can listen online.

I just have to take back one thing…

While we really do try to have something for everyone as Eugenie said, sometimes people with multiple food allergies have not had anything to eat, or had just one item that they could eat. Like, with the muffins, this one has eggs, that one has soy, the other one is egg-free AND soy-free, but contains nuts. The vegan bread and the vegan pizza crust both have no eggs and no nuts, but contain traces of soy from the lecithin in the pan spray.

We wish from the bottoms of our hearts that we really could bake for everyone, but as Alice Leonard of Angel Food Bakery (a gluten-free vegan bakery in New Zealand) once said to me, if we only served things that no-one was allergic to, all we could offer people would be a glass of water!

The fact is, if you’re allergic to everything, I recommend a wonderful company called “Enjoy Life Foods.” They do all kinds of baked goods; you can find them at Whole Foods and other grocers and online. There are hundreds of other products from other fine companies that you can order online, as I said in a previous post. If we attempted food that was free of everything, I’m sure it would not be as good as theirs is, and they already have pretty packaging.

To make what we make, you need to put in something. To make what we make you’ve got to put a lot of very fine things like almond meal and almond milk, and whole eggs from local cage-free chickens, and extra egg whites (ditto), and organic non-hydrogenated palm shortening, or organic-sunflower or -extra-virgin-olive oil. And lots and lots of organic evaporated cane juice. Not everyone can eat those things. We always try to have enough variety that everyone can eat something, but it is a humbling experience. I am continually and constantly awed by the multiple allergies that some people have to deal with.

Remember, also, that we are a very small bakery and some cross-contamination may occur with any of the ingredients we work with. We use good manufacturing practices to ensure that doesn’t happen, but in the same way that some people need a dedicated gluten-free facility, there are people who should only eat food cooked in dedicated nut-free facilities.

[Edited to add: We are completely PEANUT-FREE though. I forgot to mention that. Gluten-free, casein-free, and peanut-free. And mollusk-free.]

I remember: This took a lot longer than we thought it would. I thought when we bought an existing bakery that it was a done deal. Turns out there are no done deals with the Health Department.

(I would say, “There is no free lunch,” but that would be too hokey, even for me.)

Ta Dah!

We can open the 17th of June. But not a GRAND opening. We need a couple of weeks to work the kinks out. We’ll just open, for now, and see what you like. Come in, taste something, tell us “What kind of gf-bakery do you want?”

I guess we needed more than a couple of weeks to work out those kinks. I guess we’re just exceptionally kinky people.

by Eugenie on 5/21/07

By the middle of the day our pretty white tablecloth was covered in blueberry syrup stains, but nobody seemed to mind as they crowded around our table to taste hot belgian quinoa waffles….

So began Eugenie’s entry after the Celiac Disease Foundation Conference at the end of May. She continued….

I was a little star struck when I met the Celiac Chicks (check out their blog: www.celiacchicks.com). I have been reading their blog ….
It was also really great to meet Cameo LeBrun, the founder and president of Crave Bakery in San Francisco. Cameo started Crave in 2003 ….

Oh! So many of my heroes, all in one room! I’m definitely going to the CDF Conference next year if I have to sleep in a hotel for shabbat to do it!

by Sandee on 5/7/07

Last week was the week we’ve all been waiting for — the day the rabbi came from our kosher certification service to inspect our kitchen and make it kosher/pareve. All our baking pans (sheet pans, loaf pans, pie pans, cake pans….) had to be brand new. New cutting boards, new knives, new wooden rolling pins. New […]

Baker’s note: The aggregator-thingie couldn’t save beyond a page-break, so this is all we have on this one, but I do remember realizing what hard work it is to be a rabbi - this man had to stand over & next to 600-degree ovens all day, over a huge pot of boiling water, maneuvering other heavy pots into and out of the scalding liquid… But it certainly did the job. I had thought the utensils were clean before, but that evening they positively shined in the setting sun.

Half of Celiacs tested showed “a similarly strong inflammatory reaction” to Cows’ Milk as they did to Gluten

From Clinical & Experimental Immunology (March, 2007): 20 biopsy-confirmed celiacs now in remission were given a rectal-challenge of gluten & cows’ milk protein. (Oh, the things we do for science!)

18 of them showed an anti-gluten-type response, 10 of those 18 reacted equally to the cow’s milk (as exhibited by a different response). They then retested 6 of the 10 to see which component of cows’ milk was the culprit.

The conclusion? “A mucosal inflammatory response similar to that elicited by gluten was produced by [cows’ milk] protein in about 50% of the patients with coeliac disease. Casein, in particular, seems to be involved in this reaction.”

View the abstract on PubMed.
Clin Exp Immunol. 2007 Mar; 147(3):449-55. Mucosal reactivity to cow’s milk protein in coeliac disease. Kristjansson G, Venge P, Hallgren R., Department of Medical Sciences, University Hospital of Uppsala, Sweden.

– Baker’s Note: And that’s just the celiacs! Casein has long been implicated along with gluten in neurological (i.e., MS or ataxia) and neuropsychological diseases (most notably, Autism-Spectrum Disorder). And yet so much of gluten-free food contains dairy. Not here! The Sensitive Baker is 100% Gluten AND Casein-free.

Daniel is someone who’s been reading our blog, the old blog, through an aggegator (whatever that means — Google Reader, it turns out) and it SAVED the old material!

The record starts up in March, which is really where it got interesting anyway. [If, indeed, it ever did.] I’m going to go through and pick out the highlights and add back some pictures and post a few “retro” entries.

Which means, Daniel and others who already read this stuff, you may want to take us off your Google Reader for a little while — it’s going to be deja vu all over again.

Me & my youngest with Preston from Pacific Powerwash, who created these beautiful floors.

May 6th?!? Was I tripping?

One of my favorite parts of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the talk about “gumption traps.” He starts off covering external setbacks:

…. After days of work you finally have it all together except for: What’s this? A connecting-rod bearing liner?! How could you have left that out? Oh Jesus, everything’s got to come apart again! You can almost hear the gumption escaping. Pssssssssss.

There’s nothing you can do but go back and take it all apart again… after a rest period of up to a month that allows you to get used to the idea.

“Pssssss.” That’s exactly the sound I heard as I realized the old blog was gone: all the posts about cleaning out the gluten, and installing the oven, and “kosherizing,” and our early attempts at birthday cakes. That took the wind out of my sails, let me tell you.

But out of the ashes of the old blog will come an even better blog. We finally have a professional working on the whole site, including a Yahoo! store for online ordering. Now that he’s on the case, I have the gumption to start posting again – he will make the content look pretty soon enough.

Hurray! We’re back!