Gluten-free flours, such as rice flour, do not create elastic doughs, and if you add too much liquid, they become even harder to handle compared to traditional flours. That’s why it’s necessary to weigh all the ingredients and be very precise, to best balance the amounts of liquid, which should always be added little by little; with small and simple precautions, we will get delicious puff pastries.

One last note about vinegar. Don’t be afraid to use it, because the final result will not be affected at all; the vinegar will not be perceived in any way.

Let’s prepare the Carnival puff pastries.

I weighed the 2 eggs (yolks and whites) without their shells, for a total of 102 grams. If your eggs weigh more, you may need to add a few milliliters less vinegar; conversely, if they weigh less, you might need a few more milliliters. My rule, in these cases, is: “better a slightly firmer, slightly harder dough than one too sticky or too soft” that cannot be rolled out.

To the eggs, I added the other dry ingredients, that is, the 200 grams of rice flour, sugar, spices, baking soda (which together with the vinegar will help make the puff pastries crispy like traditional chiacchiere).

I roughly mixed everything and then added, first of all, the seed oil (which will help make the dough somewhat “more elastic”) and continued to mix (you can do it by hand or with a mixer, depending on your needs).

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

The dough was still not coming together, meaning it could not absorb the remaining flour, so I also added the remaining vinegar, little by little, until I obtained a smooth, non-sticky, and uniform dough.

At this point, I shaped it into the most spherical shape possible, moistened it with a layer of seed 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, precisely because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, these are non-elastic doughs, and it’s better to roll out small portions at a time with a rolling pin.

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

I generously dusted both the dough piece and the worktable with rice flour and rolled out the first sheet to a thickness of about a couple of millimeters.

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

In the meantime, I heated sunflower seed 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’s temperature.

The fried puff pastries should be placed, as we remove them from the oil, on a serving plate lined with absorbent kitchen paper.

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

Happy Carnival from Gabriella of

Honey flour & fantasy.