Gluten-free flours, such as rice flour, do not create elastic doughs, and if you overdo it with liquids, they become even harder to manage compared to traditional flours. This is why it’s necessary to weigh all the ingredients carefully to balance the liquid quantities, which should be added gradually; with small and simple precautions, we will get delicious pastries.

A final note on vinegar: don’t be afraid to use it, because the final result will not be affected; the vinegar will not be perceived at all.

Let’s prepare the Carnival pastries.

I weighed the 2 eggs (yolks and whites) without shell, totaling 102 grams (3.6 oz). If your eggs weigh more, you might need to add a few milliliters less vinegar; on the contrary, if they weigh less, you might need a bit more. My rule in these cases is: “better a slightly firmer dough, a bit harder than one too sticky or too soft” which cannot be rolled out.

To the eggs, I added the other dry ingredients, namely the 200 grams (1 3/4 cups) of rice flour, the sugar, the spices, the baking soda (which together with the vinegar will help make the pastries crumbly like traditional ‘chiacchiere’).

I mixed everything coarsely and then added the vegetable oil first (which will help make the dough somewhat “more elastic”) and continued to mix (this can be done by hand or with a mixer, depending on your needs).

Since the dough was lumpy and still dry, I added only half of the vinegar, continuing to knead.

The dough was still disconnected, meaning it couldn’t absorb the remaining flour, so I added the remaining vinegar, little by little, until I obtained a smooth, non-sticky, and uniform dough.

At this point, I shaped it as spherical as possible, moistened it with a thin layer of vegetable oil, and wrapped it in plastic wrap, letting it rest for about ten minutes.

After about ten minutes, I took the dough and divided it into 4 parts; I highly recommend this because, as mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, these are non-elastic doughs, and it’s better to roll out small portions at a time.

For this purpose, we will need rice flour to generously and frequently dust the table and the various sheets that we will roll out.

I generously dusted both the dough portion and the work table with rice flour and rolled out the first sheet to a thickness of about a couple of millimeters (1/16 inch).

I cut the sheet into various shapes and sizes and laid them, without overlapping and without covering them, on trays already dusted with rice flour. After finishing cutting out all the Carnival pastries, I let them sit in the open air for another 5 minutes.

In the meantime, I heated some sunflower oil in a saucepan.

When the oil reached the right temperature (try frying one to test the temperature), I started frying a few pieces at a time to avoid lowering the oil temperature.

The fried pastries should be placed, as they are removed from the oil, on a serving plate with absorbent kitchen paper.

Once the pastries are cooked, we can generously dust them with gluten-free powdered sugar.

Happy Carnival from Gabriella of

Honey, flour & fantasy.