Gluten-Free Challah: a guest recipe from Charlotte Whatley

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Today's a double treat, with our own Celia Wakefield introducing us to her long-time friend Charlotte Whatley, who recently made a truly delicious gluten-free challah bread for a festival celebration at her church. If you're like me, you're always on the lookout for tasty gluten-free recipes, because even if you don't need to be careful yourself, we all know someone who does!

 

 

 

 

Good morning to everyone in our Reds community and another grateful thanks to Julia who encourages me in so many ways, not least of which are our Sunday stories and the food we enjoy sharing. 

 

I am living in Sudbury right now owing to a more complex narrative than I need to share, but I am well and hope to return to Maine soon. But for the current situation I am also in lockdown in my assisted living apartment as there are folks in this building with COVID. Yes, just when we thought it was all over - well - did you think it was all over, because it’s not, and as this is a community of the over 50’s+ there is a need for concern. So, I have tested -clean and do mask up when I Ieave my apartment. Not to mention all the other precautions.

 

But even with all of this I do have a recipe and a story for us today from my dear friend of so many years, Charlotte Whatley. But now it's just fun to reminisce with Charlotte about times past and enjoy her great cooking. We were chatting recently, and she told me she had had a great success baking gluten free bread for a special occasion at her church. There was quite a lot of research as you will see from the directions below which Charlotte met but as you can see from the basket photo, the result of the gluten free Challah challenge had spectacular results.

 

How did Charlotte and I meet? We are reaching way back to the start of the birth of the British Butler. A time of high inflations and financial woes rather like now! our accountant, a dear friend named Bob advised us that starting a small business could offer helpful tax breaks and that is how the BB was born. However, every small business needs an income source and mine was obviously cooking. This led to gigs for dinners, for parties providing food for all the best ways of helping people celebrate. But to survive all this and grow I needed some staff and Bob’s young teen daughter, Charlotte, was not only interested in helping me, but her mother was also a great cook, so Charlotte was my dream assistant. Nothing phased her. Charlotte remembers driving those French fruit tarts you see in Parisian bakery windows; fruit arranged in artistic patterns and carefully glazed to protect the careful layering, and suddenly something darts across the road causing her to brake quickly and hearing ominous sloshing sounds behind. However, on arrival it was all found to be in perfect order.

 

We cooked in the rain, in garages, in kitchens where the ovens didn't heat up, or worse there was only hot water piped through both taps and other experiences which honed my skills for crisis management. You might wonder why crisis management would play a role with our catering escapades. Thinking back, I can recall a few key moments of crisis.

 

There was an annual holiday party which we catered for several years. One year stands out quite clearly. I was in the kitchen plating the next offering when I heard a resounding crash. A tray of glasses lay smashed on the tiled hall floor, luckily they were rented glasses and not some family heirloom. Cleaning it all up quickly and moving on to the next offering became the quick order of business. 

 

On another occasion we arrived for a select birthday party where the dessert was a hazelnut dacquoise layered with chocolate mousse and served with a fresh raspberry sauce. I carefully handed the sauce container to one of my wait staff to transport to the kitchen. To my horror, she tripped, the lid flew off and I arrived to see a raspberry rainbow of sauce across the kitchen floor and the horrified face of my host. Yes, we even survived that as it was not all spilled and cleaned up quick and easy.

 

Now on to the current cooking aspect of this blog post with our guest, Charlotte Whatley:

 

Thank you, Celia and thank you Julia, for offering me a little space here to recount my recent foray into gluten-free baking. I’d like to think I come by my writing skills honestly. 

 

Both of my grandparents were fiction writers. My grandmother, Alice Ormond Campbell, was a mystery writer in England in the early part of the 20^th century in the style of Agatha Christie. In fact, some of her books are seeing a resurgence of interest as e-books, published by Dean Street Press in recent years. She also published a series of short stories in the Chicago Tribune, maybe those articles were forerunners to today’s modern day blogging.

 

I was telling Celia that I had enjoyed researching and learning how to bake gluten-free this spring. She thought the story might interest the Reds community.  At my church we welcomed a new rector, the Rev. Mia Kano, this year and as is customary in the Episcopal faith, there was a special Celebration of New Ministry where the bishop comes to the parish and everyone celebrates the new ministry together. 

 

I am the head of our Altar Guild and I wanted to do something special to mark the occasion. These days we offer two kinds of communion bread, both wheat and gluten-free, and I wanted to bring us all together into one celebration. I went into my research project with the concept stuck in my head of, "One Bread, One Body, One Congregation." To do that, we'd need to all be gluten-free together for the evening. 

 

I had no idea when I started what an interesting and fun project this would become. I had no idea the paths it would take me down while learning about baking bread specifically to be used for communion. Now, setting aside that there may be strong beliefs, opinions, and feelings about religion, this project turned out to provide me with both religious education as well as baking education. What an extra treat! 

 

 

I started with learning the ideas surrounding communion "Eucharistic" bread - should it be leavened or unleavened? Must it contain wheat? Must it contain oats? With each new thing the internet unveiled to me, I scrambled off to our new rector to ask for her opinion and expertise, and together we settled on the recipe for the celebration. For this occasion, we chose a leavened recipe, and we included oat flour. 

 

Of course, I over baked; we couldn’t fall short so the leftovers were served with dinner. This recipe, originally published by The Loopy Whisk, is intended to be a challah bread, braided in great fashion, but we discovered it makes for the most wonderfully shaped “boule” for slicing and toasting. My GF friend is even baking and storing it regularly in her freezer! I offer many many thanks to the recipe author, The Loopy Whisk, who has made gluten free bread taste scrumptious again! My version includes which flours I chose for this specific project. Happy baking everyone!