The Simple Ingredient Swaps For Gluten-Free Cinnamon Rolls

When you lead a gluten-free diet, either by choice or for health reasons, it's far more difficult to indulge in delicious baked goods like cinnamon rolls. Luckily for you these days, there are many gluten-free bakeries, products, and ingredients to satisfy your sweet tooth. Cinnamon rolls, however, can be really delicious or totally terrible, so there are some essential ingredient swaps required to make a homemade batch so good out of the oven that you won't miss the gluten at all.

You can those ingredient swaps in our gluten-free cinnamon rolls and cream cheese frosting made by Tasting Table recipe developer Jennine Rye. The flour blend will use a combination of tapioca starch, rice flour, sorghum flour, cornstarch, xanthan gum, and salt. No matter what type of flour you use, the xanthan gum is essential because it will work as a thickener to produce the dough, which gluten typically does in regular flour. The other ingredient you might not work with often is psyllium husk powder, which will work as a binder for the buns with the wet ingredients and sugars. For the icing, it's rather traditional ingredients like confectioners' sugar and milk, both of which naturally don't have gluten.

There's a process to combine the ingredients for the dough so that it all comes together, just like any other type of baking. After the milk-and-yeast base is prepared according to Jennine Rye's instructions, the first gluten-free-friendly ingredient comes into play. Here's when you'll add the psyllium powder and let it sit to further proof. The next step is to combine all of the gluten-free flour varieties into a mixture in a separate bowl. When the psyllium powder mixture is thickened and has a gel-like texture, combine it with the flour. The rest of the process is very similar to any other cinnamon roll recipe.

There are many other types of gluten-free flour that you can use in these cinnamon rolls. The key is to work carefully since gluten-free baking is even more finicky than baking with traditional ingredients. To keep it easy, find a gluten-free all-purpose flour that contains xanthan gum to replace the blend, and measure accordingly. Other types that can work with proper adjustments include millet or sorghum flours for your gluten-free cinnamon rolls.