Monday, May 3, 2010

King Arthur Gluten-Free Muffin Mix

King Arthur Flour has not only introduced a gluten-free flour mix, but they have a complementary line of gluten-free mixes including the muffin mix I am reviewing today.

This mix is a vanilla base, but it is intended to be made your favorite way. Blueberry muffins anyone? Or perhaps you prefer them as apple cinnamon muffins. I decided to make mine as banana chocolate chip muffins.

The recipe calls for butter, eggs, and milk. As usual, I replaced these with allergen-free alternatives. Specifically, in addition to the base mix I added:
  • 6 Tbps Earth Balance (in place of the 6 tbsp butter or oil). I think canola oil would work equally well.
  • 3 flax seed ‘eggs’ (see my post on flax seed goop to learn how to make these).
  • ¾ cup of rice milk (in place of the cow’s milk). I would also suggest unsweetened hemp milk.
  • 2 bananas – I used overripe bananas that I had previously frozen.
  • 1 cup Enjoy Life semi-sweet chocolate chips.
The first thing I noticed was that this is a batter-like mix, which means that you need a structure to hold the batter. I filled a standard 12 muffin pan, but they did run over a little. This may have been due to my substitutions and additions. I could have made about 15 muffins with this one mix. This would also work nicely in a bread pan. Also note that I needed to leave it in the oven about 25 minutes (rather than the recommended 18-22).

The ingredients include rice flour, potato starch and tapioca starch, as well as both guar gum and xantham gum. This mix is not for you if you have corn allergies (due to cornstarch and xantham gum).

I found these muffins to be on the sweet side (not surprising since the first ingredient is sugar). In that respect I found them to be more of a dessert muffin than a breakfast muffin – that’s a personal preference. I will point out however, that the ingredient list is very similar to the King Arthur gluten-free cake mix (that I will be reviewing in a future post).

So, how did they come out? Quite nicely! This mix works extremely well with the allergen-free substitutions and the muffins tasted great!

Thanks go out to the folks at King Arthur Flour who sent me this free sample to try!

Try them and let me know what you think.

3 comments:

GlutenFibroFree said...

I'm excited to see more gluten-free mixes on the market!

Colette said...

GlutenFibroFree, I agree! This opens up a lot of options for us!

Jacklyn Cornwell said...

I do not have a gluten allergy, but I have tried and loved King Arthur gluten-free mixes. I love all their mixes. The quality is excellent and the taste marvelous.