gluten-free corn-free soy-free vegan brownies. no, seriously.

[saramily]

I have a friend going through food allergy testing who currently can't eat gluten, dairy, corn, soy, or refined sugar, but can have chocolate with a sufficiently high percentage of cacao. Brownies were a challenge, but not an impossible one!


I adapted this vegan brownie recipe to come up with the following:


1 1/4 cups sweet rice flour
- I used stone ground rice flour, cause that's what I had. I think almond flour would be a good choice as well.

1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup white sugar
- I used 2 and 1/4 cups of brown rice syrup, which led to some other alternations to maintain the liquid balance. If you can find date sugar, I bet it'd work better.

1 cup water
- reduced to 1/3 cup because of the brown rice syrup

1/2 cup vegan butter, melted plus
- Most vegan butters have soy or corn oil, so changed to about a 1/3 cup flax oil

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
- switched to dark chocolate 72% cacao chips

3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
- made sure to use organic to avoid sneaky additives

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat oven to 350.

Heat 1/3 cup water and 1/4 cup rice flour in a saucepan until it forms a paste. Set aside to cool. (This doesn't take long or require too much cooking, you just need to get the flour and water well-integrated)

Mix remaining cup of rice flour, baking powder, cocoa powder and salt.

Stir in vanilla and flax oil.

Stir in sugar and flour/water paste. I also added honey to taste at this stage to sweeten the batter, since the rice syrup + rice flour made it less sweet than I like.

Stir in chocolate chips.

Pour into greased 9"x13" pan and bake approx 40 - 45min.

These came out fairly dense and chewy, but definitely brownie-tasting!

I still didn't think the finished product was quite chocolatey enough, so I melted approx 1/2 cup of the extra dark chocolate chips in a "double boiler" (my pottery mixing bowl stuck on top of a saucepan with an inch of water in it, turned on med-low) with some honey to make a ganache/frosting, let it cool for a minute, and spread it over the top. DELICIOUS. And my friend agreed!


cross-posted to saramily

Comments

[killing_rose]

Oh, wow. I've been trying to find vegan brownies that are gluten free (and soy free)--I cook for myself, but also help a friend out every once in a while. And every brownie I've tried has to have eggs.

Will definitely try this one out.

[saramily]

Oh, glad I could help! I hope the recipe works out for you.

[dragonwolf]

You can substitute out eggs for a number of things in nearly any recipe imaginable. I posted what I knew over at Omnomnom and ended up with over half a dozen responses with other stuff to use.

[killing_rose]

A lot of gluten free soy free dairy free brownies *have to* have eggs to make the texture correct. Every one that I've tried to convert has...well, either it's failed spectacularly for me or it's failed for the person who came up with the recipe.

[dragonwolf]

One person in the post I linked mentioned an egg substitute called Ener-g. Perhaps that could be of use? I've never used it, so I don't know if it would fulfill your needs, but it might be worth looking into if you haven't already.


*Shrug* Even with a number of friends/family members who are veg* and others who are/have Celiac and/or various other dietary restrictions, I haven't needed to combine all restrictions into one recipe, so I'm kind of just tossing out ideas to try to help. Knowing what my friends go through with even one of the major restrictions when trying to find recipes they can do, I understand to some extent how much of a pain it can be and can only imagine having to combine more than one.

[killing_rose]

I was actually the person who mentioned Ener-g.

Don't worry about it--I rarely need to combine the vegan aspects into my cooking, so I rarely need to make vegan brownies. (I make everything gluten-free by default.) So the next time I need to, I'll use this recipe and if it doesn't quite work, it won't kill me to go back to the drawing board.

But thanks for the help!

[dragonwolf]

*facepalm* I'm observant.