Gluten Free Grissini (Crisp Italian Breadsticks)

Recipe

These gluten free grissini are the ultimate snack. Crisp and salty with toasty seeds or herbs, they're at home on any cheese or antipasti platter. Incredible by themselves or dunked in a dip, you're going to love these little guys.

Gluten free grissini can be hard to find, and when you do find them they're often less than spectacular to eat. A good grissini makes such a great snack and an even better addition to a cheese or antipasti platter so I had to find a way to recreate them without gluten! These grissini are as quick and easy to make as they are delicious, and as a bonus they're really customisable. But be warned - they're addictive! I was actually a little bit sad when I got the recipe right; no more taste testing!

This dough always looks pretty dry and unpromising when you first start mixing it - don't worry, it's meant to be dry to help with the crisp grissini texture, and it will come together! Get your hand in there and give it a good squeeze and knead. Once it starts coming together scrape down the bowl and form it into a rough ball ready to prove. The dough should double in size during proving (top right photo below), once it's ready give it a good knead on a lightly floured surface until it's nice and smooth (bottom left).

This recipe makes 20 grissini, and if like me you like things to be exact you can divide your dough into around 16g pieces so they're all the same size. Each piece of dough gets rolled out into a 20cm sausage, ready for coating in seeds or other toppings (see below for other flavour ideas!). I usually find this dough super easy to work with and doesn't require much flour during rolling, but if yours feels a bit sticky try to use as little flour as possible to roll the dough into lengths.

I like to set up my seeds or other toppings on a large tray to keep it all neat and tidy, but you can also sprinkle them directly onto the dough on the work surface. If you happen to have a bit too much flour on your dough for the seeds to stick try spraying it ever so lightly with water to make them stick. Once you have your dough coated in seeds give it a gentle roll back and forth on the work surface to make sure they're all stuck on properly.

The grissini need one last prove before baking. The amount of time you give them really depends on how warm your kitchen is. If it's nice and warm and/or you have a sunny patch to put them in they might only need 10 minutes. If it's chilly though they might need 20 minutes or more. There's no hard and fast method for telling when gluten free doughs are ready to bake. For these, I like them to be clearly puffed up compared to how they were before I put them in the oven. Once your grissini are cooked you can tell if they were proved enough; if they have a big air bubble along lengths of the grissini (called "tunneling" because, well, it looks like a tunnel) that means they were under proved and they'll need a little longer next time. They'll still be delicious though!

The bake time for these grissini might seem pretty long for such skinny little things, but we're aiming to dry them out all the way through. If they don't dry out properly they'll be chewy in the middle, which would be weird. My oven doesn't bake particularly evenly, so I like to rotate my tray halfway through to even out the browning.

Other topping ideas:

• Any other seeds will work well, such as black sesame, poppy seeds or fennel seeds.

• Dried herbs are also a fantastic option! Hard herbs like rosemary or thyme will do well sprinkled on the outside like seeds, but softer herbs such as oregano will be better mixed into the dough itself.

• Spices like garlic powder, smoked paprika or chilli flakes will also be fantastic mixed into the dough.

For the grissini in these photos I used about 20g of sesame seeds and a couple of tablespoons of dried rosemary. You might need more or less toppings depending on how much you'd like on your grissini.