No Wheat, No Worries

HEATHER HARDCASTLE-PERKO ’94

Heather Hardcastle-Perko ’94, ’90 LS was diagnosed as gluten intolerant at both the wrong time and the right time. It was 2000, just a few years before a landmark study on celiac disease would thrust wheat proteins into the national spotlight and spark a boom of gluten-free foods about a decade later. The timing of her diagnosis meant two things: that the availability of delicious gluten-free baked goods was lacking, and that the market would be ready for her when she came up with something better.

In 2007, Hardcastle enrolled at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Napa Valley. Her goal was personal, not professional; she and her husband had their own landscape design company in San Francisco, and she had no desire for the restaurant life. “I just wanted to learn technique and make my own thing,” she asserts.

Her own thing would eventually morph into a business, however: Flour Craft Bakery & Café, Marin County’s first gluten-free bakery, with locations in San Anselmo and Mill Valley. Depending on the season, you might find blueberry-lemon scones, sourdough waffles, pumpkin crumble muffins, hazelnut brown butter brownies, flourless mudslide cookies, chocolate cupcakes, blackberry cheesecake galette, vegetable quiches, “fancy” toasts, fresh salads, open-faced sandwiches, and much more. “We always say that our products are simply good, and the fact that they’re gluten-free is just a bonus,” says Hardcastle.

It began with granola. Two years after graduating from CIA, she rented a commercial kitchen in the evenings and made gluten-free granola to sell at farmers markets. The feedback was positive and she began selling the product in local stores. Today, she sells three flavors of granola—maple pecan, cranberry almond, and raisin walnut cacao nib—in Whole Foods and other grocery stores from Monterey to Reno, as well as online.

Hardcastle also used the farmers markets as an opportunity to test and refine recipes for other gluten-free baked goods. Buoyed by the response, she and her husband, Rick Perko, closed the landscape business and opened Flour Craft’s first storefront in downtown San Anselmo in 2013. “Opening a restaurant is not for the faint of heart. It’s a super long process. It takes twice as long as you think it will and costs twice as much. And then once the doors open, that’s when the real work starts.”

The year the bakery opened, gluten-free foods and beverages were a $10.5 billion industry. The Food and Drug Administration set rules for defining “gluten-free” on food labels, yet another indication of the diet’s growing presence in American life. Flour Craft developed a following and earned positive reviews in regional publications. In the spring of 2018, five years after opening in San Anselmo, Hardcastle and Perko added a location in the Mill Valley Lumber Yard, a historic collection of rustic red buildings that had been newly restored as a quaint shopping village and community gathering space. This Flour Craft, which resides in a converted carriage house, offers more madeto-order, savory breakfast and lunch items; Hardcastle describes it as more of a “plant-based café.” For a while, Flour Craft was the only eatery in the Lumber Yard. Business is popping. “It’s busier than we thought it would be, which has a different set of challenges,” says Hardcastle, who also makes a lot of special occasion cakes. She adds: “I am very much a working chef. I like to be doing production, working in the kitchen. For me, the struggle of being an owner is how to have enough time to grow the business.”

Customers order baked goods from Flour Craft's Mill Valley location.

If the kitchen is where she prefers to be, it shows. “I have no shortage of ideas,” she says. Scouring blogs, magazines, and cookbooks, and drawing from her own travels, she finds a recipe that grabs her and sets to work on figuring out how to make it gluten-free. “I get inspired by what other people are doing and find a way to make it my own,” she notes. Instead of using wheat flour, Hardcastle bakes with flours made from almonds, rice, millet, sorghum, and tapioca. The challenge of baking with alternative flours is that they don’t behave the same way as traditional flour, and it’s easy to lose the texture and lightness of the original. A lot of recipes call for a generic gluten-free flour mix, she said, but what you end up with is a brownie that has the same consistency as a scone. “It’s not one size fits all,” she explains. Her solution: She creates her own flour blends that are unique to each item. It takes a fair amount of experimentation, but by now she can usually nail a recipe on the second try—although bread is a different story. Hardcastle confesses, “Bread is the most difficult to make gluten-free, and those recipes are sometimes a months-long process.”

Of course, persistence is nothing new to a Santa Catalina alumna. “I really feel like Catalina gave me a lot of confidence to pursue what it was that I enjoyed, and to figure out a way to make that work for me and the life I want to make for myself,” Hardcastle says.