DIY -- gluten free

So I have some new family members, thanks to a wedding, and some of them are gluten sensitive.

For T-day I undertook to bake gluten free cookies. I asked for flour recommendations and used the one I could get most of, Bob's Red Mill, since I have used lots of Bob's other products in the past. Like, I use their Dark Rye flour to make sourdough starter for all my sourdough bread.

I used five traditional recipes, three of which I had never made before. One, the madeleines, I had made for my nieces before so it was a good test of whether the recipe worked out. The answer was, the texture seemed a little different, but it tasted OK. The others were: shortbread; snowballs aka Mexican wedding cookies or Russian tea cookies; sand tarts, which are Amish, and I used a family recipe; and Viennese honey cookies, a recipe that probably came from my ancient Jewish festival cookbook.

So we got to talking about pasta; gluten free pasta is supposed to be gummy. I've heard the same complaint about Passover noodles (which are mostly egg so Passover noodle soup is actually more like egg drop soup, but it might also happen if they have potato starch in them) and I had the same experience with commercial dairy free English muffins, but not with my scratch homemade English muffins made without milk.

I still had some of the flour left and made a half batch this morning, then cooked it with chicken cacciatore. Just-cooked, the noodles are gummy.  Put into the sauce, they turn out very soft. That's sad. If I had used xanthan gum for a binder, instead of the egg which is in the normal recipe, it might have been different. I'm not going there. My heart goes out to you who can't tolerate normal pasta.

Now, if you are Jewish, you must be wondering if this is ok for Passover. The answer seems to be that matzah has to be made out of a grain that CAN become leavened, which applies to the five standard grains. Of those five, oat has the lowest gluten, and it can be heated into inactivity. But that makes it impossible to leaven so you're going around in circles. There seems to be a new breed of oats so low in gluten it really doesn't matter, and that is good enough for the requirements of the seder -- but only when there's a medically diagnosed health risk. If gluten-free is a personal lifestyle choice with no underlying medical problems, you are still responsible for eating normal matzo.
https://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/1814200/jewish/Can-I-Have-Gluten-Free-Matzah-on-Passover.htm

So cookies, yes. Pasta, not really. Pie dough -- my new nephew wasn't happy with what he turned out. Cake, IDK. Some of these things, there's probably zero health complications if you can't get them.

Chemistry is chemistry. Mind over matter will not change how molecules interact; if it could, people with Crohn's and similar disorders could just ignore all the horrible effects on their bodies of eating gluten and we wouldn't be here. Trying to manufacture a substitute that behaves exactly like what you're replacing probably will chew up a huge amount of carbon footprint in development. Unless it's necessary for survival, I would say just fuhgeddabout gluten free pasta. There is plenty of great tasting food out there anyway.