Australian gluten free products
Going against the grain doesn’t mean going without flavour. Fiona Donnelly reports.
It may shock true-blue Aussies but lamingtons are not everybody’s cup of tea – though Joseph Zehnder says the tasty Queensland sponge cakes do go down a treat in Italy and Greece.
The founder of Maleny-based Zehnder Gluten Free now has two factories in Queensland, and a third in Switzerland, supplying global demand for his gluten free breads, cakes and more, and so keeping tabs on world preferences is crucial.
“The Scandanavian market thinks the lamington is not their style – it’s too sweet,” says Joseph, who started out four years ago baking gluten free treats for a local cafe.
“I made gluten free cakes for the cabinet and at first clients didn’t know that they were gluten free, but people from Brisbane and beyond – celiacs heard and the word very quickly spread.”
Now Joseph, a trained chef who began with just five products, has 60 items on the go from pre-mixes and pizza bases to pasta, with another 60 offerings in the wings.
“We want to use natural products, not additives. Everything has to be good for the consumer,” he says. “It has to taste the same as a top product and be of the same quality – you have to enjoy it.”
With no celiacs in the family, Joseph said it was the challenge of being able to come up with no-compromise gluten free fare which first pulled him in.
“We’re still the only one with bread that will bend around a sausage without breaking,” he says. “At the end of the year we’ll have a new generation of breads.”
The biggest problem devising new products is getting the flour proportions right. “They all behave differently. You can’t just use one flour.” Joseph says.
When recipes call for a wheat flour, it’s relatively straight forward but Zehnder has had to come up with different gluten free flour blends to suit each specific category of baking.
With five children, The Zehnders are never short of taste testers. “They are very critical little ones and know what normal product tastes like – so they tell us straight out whether something is good enough,” he says.
For home cooks there will soon also be a range of gluten free flours that can used as a direct, simple replacement for wheat flours.
GLUTEN FREE STUFFED CHICKEN recipe by Zehnder Gluten Free
Zehnder Gluten Free is just one of the producers who’ll showcase wares at The Good Food Wine Show at The Brisbane Convention Exhibition Centre from November 4-6.
Check out the Macro gluten free area presented by The Courier-Mail and discover more Queensland companies at a Taste of Queensland.
Information in this article is correct as of 25 October, 2011
Source
Taste.com.au – The Courier-Mail – October 2011
Author
Fiona Donnelly
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