Encouraging home cooks to put xanthan gum into their home baked products? Wow. The main reason many of us are at your website is so we can get away from those hyper processed food like substances that we've all been feeding ourselves for the past few decades, but are clearly not what we should be eating. Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide, derived from the bacterial coat of Xanthomonas campestris, used as a food additive and rheology modifier,[2] commonly used as a food thickening agent (in salad dressings, for example) and a stabilizer (in cosmetic products, for example, to prevent ingredients from separating). It is produced by fermentation of glucose, sucrose, or lactose by the Xanthomonas campestris bacterium. After a fermentation period, the polysaccharide is precipitated from a growth medium with isopropyl alcohol, dried, and ground into a fine powder. Later, it is added to a liquid medium to form the gum. Does that sound like something we should be eating? Yuck! You guys allow us to make our own solutions to this problem...please don't make it worse! Kimberly, I'm getting an answer for you from our GF product and recipe developers. In the meantime, I can comment that you could write the same type of "chemicalese" about the yeast bread fermentation process, should you want to get down to the molecular level... We do pride ourselves on using top-quality ingredients here at King Arthur, and would never offer our customers an OK, here's what our GF team says, courtesy of Dr. Andrea Brown, our test kitchen PhD: I’m sorry that you don't like this ingredient. We certainly respect your choice not to use it. Though it is in our mixes, we provide 3 gluten free flour blends (our white flour, our GF whole grain flour, and our ancient grains) as well as several gluten free starches that you can use to make your own gluten free baked goods. Xanthan gum is a natural substance, but it is purified with isopropyl alcohol, which gives you pause. On the one hand, I can understand why: isopropyl alcohol is not safe to drink. However, it is used in rubbing alcohol and facial toner since it evaporates easily. That makes it nice for food safe preparations, since it quickly evaporates away from the purified xanthan gum. Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide, a molecule made of sugars linked together, as are starch, cellulose, and pectin. It sounds yucky that it is made by bacteria, but many things we eat are fermented by bacteria - cheese, yogurt, vinegar, and sauerkraut. We all have more bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, and we can’t digest food without them. Bacteria are necessary. Xanthan gum provides much needed structure in gluten free baked goods. If we didn’t use it, we would need to use a gum purified from beans or seaweed, which tend to have a stronger flavor and not perform as well. We don't see xanthan gum as a health hazard. It is FDA approved and a natural product of this kind of bacteria. Though it is purified with an alcohol that isn’t safe to drink, this alcohol is used in topical products safe for people and evaporates quickly, so we feel xanthan gum processed with it is safe to use.

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