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When I was falling in love with my now-wife, a decade ago, it helped that I had a raging sweet tooth and she made a killer cake. An athletic science nerd, Rebekah turned into an artist around dough—coaxing spongy almond loaves from her tiny dorm oven, always volunteering to bring triple-layer cakes to potluck dinners. “You could start with cheddar cheese and sawdust and still bake something insanely delicious,” a friend once remarked.

So when Rebekah was diagnosed with celiac disease—an autoimmune condition that requires you to scrupulously avoid eating gluten—it was a deep blow. Bread and pasta were immediately off the table, but so was birthday cake at office gatherings and the cookies-and-cream ice cream at a neighbor’s dinner party. When it came time to pick our wedding cake, our options narrowed to a precious few (though we found a place that knocked it out of the park). And when our foodie friends came in to town last year, obsessed with trying out the cookies and pies at a hot new bakery, the only thing Rebekah could buy was a tiny tub of artisanal butter and then watch while everyone moaned over the buttery pastries.

Sure, gluten-free baking recipes exist, but most of the fava-bean flour and xantham-gum experiments we tried were arduous, and the results disappointing (“Is this cupcake supposed to look gray?”). And how do you figure out how to swap wheat flour for tapioca and rice flours in Grandma’s rosemary loaf?


When I first heard that Thomas Keller (the master chef behind Bouchon Bakery, Per Se, and French Laundry) had spent three years developing a gluten-free flour blend that you could sub into any recipe, cup for cup, I couldn’t get my hands on a three-pound bag fast enough. “Let’s start with something simple, like pancakes,” my wife suggested. “Let’s not get too excited.” But I convinced her that testing out the flour should mean really putting it to the test, and so we broke out the new Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook, determined to make a mind-blowing cookie.

It took Rebekah 30 minutes to settle on the corn cookies (in her defense, she’d gone from having zero options to having dozens), but an hour later we were biting into chewy gluten-free cookies that tasted exactly like the wheat-filled version sold in the beloved bakery. We ate the first cookies in silence and then, brushing the crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand, Rebekah turned to me and asked, “What can we bake next?” With Cup 4 Cup, it seems, anything we want. (cup4cup.com, sold at Williams Sonoma and Bouchon Bakery, $19)

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