Carême gluten-free pastry – it’s finally here!

Stop the pastry presses: Carême Pastry’s highly anticipated gluten-free pastry is now available for retail sale.

Based in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, a world-famous food and wine destination, Carême has a reputation for producing exceptional ready-to-use pastry dough. After much public demand, Carême has now released its gluten-free shortcrust pastries in sour cream and sweet vanilla bean flavours. The pastries are free from preservatives, additives and gums. They are butter-based and made from natural ingredients.

Back in April, I was in the right place at the right time and snared an opportunity to attend a pastry testing session at Carême. What a privilege it was! A small group of us had a gluten-free pastry tutorial from Carême’s William Wood, pastry chef and brilliant foodie. To give you an idea of his status in the food industry, William provided a pastry tutorial for MasterChef, Australia’s television juggernaut. To view that footage, click here.

With William and his partner Claire, we discussed the challenges of gluten-free cooking and what qualities we would like to have in a ready-to-use pastry. We worked with the pastry, taste tested plain baked pastry and made amazing lemon tarts. We were even sent home with sample pastry (and the lemon tarts!) to see what we could come up with at home. It was a very special experience.

Back then, the pastry was still in development. But even then it was better than any other commercially available product that I’d come across. It rolled out easily. We pressed it into pastry cases without it splitting and breaking and it was flexible enough to bend without cracking. This was ground-breaking stuff for gluten-free pastry. But even though they had already come up with a superior product, Claire and William wanted to improve the pastry. Their philosophy was that it should not just be better than other gluten-free pastries on the market; it should be as good as their beautiful gluten range.

I’ve not yet tested the final product, but there are a couple of packets in my freezer just waiting for a grand-scale cook-up.

Having breathlessly waited for the release of this pastry (well, not quite breathlessly, but you get the idea), it’s really exciting that the pastry is now available for retail sale. I’m not very experienced in working with pastry. I occasionally dabbled with gluten pastries, but gave up on gluten-free commercial pastries because they looked terrible, tasted average, didn’t freeze well and were hard to work with. The expense and effort didn’t seem worthwhile.

I’m going to learn all about gluten-free pastry now, and learn it fast. I hope to post plenty of recipes inspired by Carême’s new range. If you want to know more, click here for recipes, tutorials and general information (including stockists). Happy baking!