The power of alternative flours Corydon eatery and bakery turning out tasty treats that spare the gluten but not the flavour By: Declan Schroeder Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Sunday, Sep. 19, 2021

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This article was published 19/09/2021 (1471 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Have you tried gluten-free food?” the late comedian John Pinette asked the crowd in his popular Still Hungry stand-up routine. “It needs gluten! I don’t know what gluten is, but apparently, it’s delicious and you need to put that back in there!”

The rotund funny man goes on to rant and rave about when he was restricted to a gluten-free diet by a doctor at a health and fitness centre, railing against the inferiority of gluten-free bread (“I tried to toast it. It broke the toaster!”) and gluten-free pasta (“pasta, you boil, boiling water, 10 minutes or less, little olive oil, little salt… gluten-free pasta? Ninety minutes!”)

He ends the bit by pretending the microphone cord is the pasta, before fashioning it into a noose, implying that life without gluten-filled foods is not one worth living at all.

But Betsy Hiebert, owner of Cocoabeans Gluten-Free Bakery and Kitchen on Corydon Avenue, has made it her mission to make sure a life without gluten is not without the joy of enjoying sweet treats and things usually made of wheat.

Cocoabeans offers a wide array of breads, cakes, cupcakes, cookies, muffins, tarts, pies and more — in addition to a savoury food menu of sandwiches, salads, bowls, and brunchy items — that can be enjoyed by those with celiac disease or gluten intolerance.

Hiebert sat down for an interview on a recent warm and sunny Friday morning prior to opening. Behind her, staff hustled to bake the day’s offerings and fill the showcase in advance of the busy day to come at the Corydon Avenue storefront.

When she was shown Pinette’s routine, she admitted she felt like he did in the early days following her diagnosis with celiac disease about 12 years ago.

She and her three kids, who have also all been diagnosed as having celiac disease, began eating all gluten-free foods, but they weren’t great.

“Everything had a sandy texture, if there was pasta it would take 15 minutes to boil…” she said. “You’d be chewing and chewing and chewing and you wanted to like it but it was really, really hard to like.”

She recalled going to a gluten-free bakery and not enjoying anything she tried. “I kinda went: ‘Oh my word. If I have to eat this for the rest of my life, just shoot me…’ I thought ‘If this (gluten-free food) is now what I’m forced to eat for the rest of my life, I don’t want to eat at all.’”

Hiebert said she never really liked food to begin with, because most things made her feel sick. But for years, she didn’t know why, as she was only diagnosed with celiac as an adult, after one of her daughters was.

Celiac disease is hereditary — two of Hiebert’s sisters and her brother have it as well.

“I was eating food to survive, not to enjoy… I didn’t like pizza and I didn’t like pasta, I didn’t like anything that was glutinous because I didn’t feel good… I just avoided food,” Hiebert said, noting she subsisted mostly on hard-boiled eggs and yogurt.

She kept thinking that there must a way to make gluten-free foods more enjoyable, and as a self-proclaimed “problem solver,” she set out to do just that. She bought every gluten-free cookbook she could find and snatched up any gluten-free ingredient she could find in stores or online.

She did tons of research on the grinds and properties of different flours that weren’t wheat, rye, or barley-based — almond flour, oat four, rice flour, to name just a few — and started experimenting.

Her husband thought she was “crazy” at first; her kids laughed when she bought a bread maker. “I don’t know how many loaves of bread failed on me,” she said.

But she kept plugging away and getting her kids, siblings, and neighbours to taste her offerings and give her honest feedback. Soon enough, they started to tell her how good they were, (at first, she didn’t believe them).

Eventually, it got to a point where her kids were on board and saying, “Keep it coming, mom,” Hiebert recalled. She began to sell her baked goods at farmers markets, but soon went bricks-and-mortar, opening up the original Cocoabeans on Tache Avenue in 2010. In 2016, she moved to the current location at Corydon between Arbuthnot and Cockburn Streets.

Cocoabeans is unique in Winnipeg as a dedicated gluten-free facility, meaning no products containing gluten come into the building. That lowers the risk of cross-contamination to zero and gives customers an added level of confidence they won’t get sick.

People with celiac disease can’t “cheat” and have a little bit of gluten here and there. Their bodies can’t process it and if they consume it, they may have abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, vomiting, or a whole host of other adverse reactions.

Flour poofs into the air, Hiebert explained, and remnants of flour stay on surfaces and baking equipment because of how fine it is.

Bakeries that use gluten ingredients can’t necessarily ensure even gluten-free items they make will be safe for the celiac crowd to eat, even though they try their best to keep everything clean and separate, Hiebert said.

“For the café section, we’ve had celiacs come and say ‘you know, I haven’t been here for a while because I’ve been trying other places but every other place I’ve got sick.’”

“There is really no fail-safe way to have a gluten-free cake at another bakery unless they’re dedicated gluten-free,” she said. “There is no threat, zero threat, of wheat, rye and barley in our bakery.”

Customers with dietary restrictions — Cocoabeans also has dairy-free and vegan offerings — really appreciate that they don’t have to worry when coming to Cocoabeans, Hiebert said.

“When people find us for the first time, they ask us ‘What’s gluten-free here?’” To which, Hiebert and staff simply point to a sign adorning the rafters that proudly proclaims “Yes, it really all is gluten-free!”

Some customers have been brought to tears because they were so overwhelmed with finding out that all of a sudden, they could enjoy a wide range of foods they thought they’d never be able to eat again.

“We would come and give them a hug… and they’d say ‘Well I want one of everything because (eating gluten-free) has been so hard.’”

“It makes my day and my sole purpose is to make amazing gluten-free food for people who… we don’t want them to feel like they’re missing out, because I know what that feels like,” she said. “It just gives me that boost of energy to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep learning.”

It’s Hiebert’s goal to make everyday eating easier and also make special occasions enjoyable again.

For example, when brides phone about wedding cakes, it makes them happy to find out they can have a cake at their special day they can actually eat, Hiebert said.

Custom-designed birthday cakes are also a big hit: “people want a real cake that they can share with their friends and family,” Hiebert said, “and that their family and friends actually like too, and don’t go ‘Oh, poor you. You have to eat this? I feel so sorry,’ but they’ll eat it out of respect or because they don’t want to offend you.”

The same goes with dainty platters for special events: “they feel good they can have a dainty platter that everyone’s going to enjoy.

Hiebert said she feels more like a mad scientist than a baker at times because she is always testing out new ingredients that hit the market — such as chia seed, flax, or psyllium as a binder instead of xanthan gum.

A good example of this is Cocoabeans’ breads, which Hiebert said is “hands down” the most challenging thing to convert to gluten-free.

“When you take gluten out of bread, you basically take out the stability,” Hiebert said (gluten is a protein that helps foods maintain their shape; a “glue” that keeps things together.)

“Bread is so ridiculously finicky. If you do not have your ratios correct, you will get a brick, or you will get mush, or you will get a bread that crumbles unless you toast it,” she said. If there’s not enough structure, the bread will rise but then flop over the edges of the loaf pan.

To make a loaf that has a good taste, chew, lift, and crust, it takes many types of flour — as many as six or seven out of 20 possible flours might go into a single loaf. “Just one or two doesn’t cut it,” like it does with glutinous bread, Hiebert said.

Throughout the years, Hiebert has used quinoa, since it’s high-protein, but then switched to amaranth and later to teff, a staple of African cuisine. Tapioca starch, potato starch, white rice flour, brown rice flour, millet, chia, and ground flax all have roles to play. Just prior to the pandemic, Cocoabeans developed a recipe for sourdough and it’s now its top seller.

Just like a gluten-free bread can’t be successful with just one flour, Cocoabeans couldn’t be successful without great staff, Hiebert said. She credits them for playing a key role in continually improving the shop’s goods and procedures.

For example, she said Lindsay Feduniw, who has been a pastry instructor, has identified small bad habits that alter the end result.

“For me, I was self-taught, and just learning as I go, but she’s professionally taught and she brought a wealth of knowledge and methodology to improve our cakes, improve our breads, everything that’s coming out of the bakery, and she’s been my dream bakery supervisor.”

Before, Cocoabeans was just trying to make as much stuff as fast as possible while having it taste and look good. But after coming on board six or seven months ago, Feduniw implemented better practices, ones as straightforward as not opening and closing the oven doors when cakes are baking so they bake more consistently.

Hiebert also said head chef Christy Barkman has amped up the dine-in menu substantially and that Kelsey Gadsby Pauls is a wizard at managing the front of house, giving customers great service, and answering all the questions they have about allergens and ingredients.

Like all other businesses, Cocoabeans has had to pivot during the pandemic. A lot of customers told Hiebert they were craving fried foods but weren’t comfortable ordering them for takeout from other restaurants, since most don’t have a dedicated gluten-free fryer.

So Cocoabeans started offering frozen onion rings, chicken tenders, and mozzarella sticks, which have been received well. Since people were at home more, it also started selling take-and-bake meals such as chili, lasagna, macaroni and cheese, and pot pies.

“We let our customers kind of lead us and guide us as to what they are looking for, I mean, within reason,” she said. “If enough people ask could we get this or have that, then you go ‘ooh, maybe this is something we should explore.” For example, a lot of customers have been clamouring for croissants (no promises there from Hiebert.)

Cocoabeans has started doing its own delivery and is also on GoodLocal, which delivers all sorts of Winnipeg wares.

Some of the many different delivery options include pre-packaged cake, cookie, and pizza-dough mixes; they are also available in a number of grocery stores and specialty shops around town.

Hiebert’s current focus is learning more about the wholesale market and production so she can “take some of it to the masses.” She’s starting an accelerated course for entrepreneurial women who want to expand into larger markets so she learn the best way to get Cocoabeans’ goods onto shelves in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario, and beyond.

While she tries to accommodate as many dietary restrictions as possible, the pandemic has also helped to refocus things. Hiebert has realized she can’t be all things to all people and has re-established her main goal as providing great gluten-free baking.

Even so, Hiebert said it’s a “big benchmark” when people who aren’t celiac or otherwise trying to avoid gluten come to Cocoabeans not because it’s a good gluten-free bakery, but because it’s simply a good bakery, no modifiers required.

“That is the most rewarding, when somebody comes to me and says ‘your stuff is amazing and you can’t even tell that it’s gluten-free and that I would serve this to whoever.’”

declan.schroeder@freepress.mb.ca