Q#1- RWS is short for Resistant Wheat Starch.
Q#2- Too subjective to answer. Me personally, I learned early on that if ingredients don't go bad on the shelf, I decide if I want to have yet one more to store and I have the pantry space to keep on hand for "just that one recipe" I really, really want to try. If the product is <$10 and will be used in small amounts and likely last a long time, I'll do that. That way I don't have to agonize with each recipe I wanted to try, whether to buy, the going price and have to order & wait to get it.

Topic #3- I use this recipe repeatedly because MY palate likes it the best of all of my biscuit recipes. Closest to traditional flour biscuits IMHO, but I'd be lying if I said they were AS GOOD AS traditional flour biscuits. So to be honest, Ken, YOUR palate may not like these (or their texture) at all if/when you try them. I can't tell you how many LC biscuits I have baked just because the recipe author said "these are fantastic" that ended up in the trash can. As with all cooking, no two people's taste will be the same. I may LOVE something YOU love; I may detest it. That's life.

Something has to be going wrong with your dumpling trials. Glucomannan is glucomannan and all brands I have used have performed the same for me. That's not true of a lot of LC ingredients, almond flour and coconut flours being prime examples of that. Big differences in brands on those. I have made two new recipes just in the past month with the "Peggy's Original Dumplings" recipe and they cooked up soft and fluffy as they always do for me, even submerged in my most recent Taste Of Italy casserole, where liquid was minimal (that success really surprised me, too!). In your two trials, did you use the later Einkorn recipe for dumplings? Because I have found I don't like that recipe as well as the "original" version. That is the ONE time adding a bit of Einkorn to a recipe DID NOT please me. Made them a little too dense. Other followers liked that one BETTER and precisely because they were denser. But if your two trials were with the "original dumpling" recipe, I give up..........I can think of no other reasons yours are not coming out soft.

All I can say is stick with it, as I have followers (both who have and have not had initial fails), who stuck with their efforts that have come back and told me theirs finally came out "as advertised", soft and fluffy. In most cases, they thought their problems were in handling, simmer level too high, or cooking before the gluc dough had properly set up a few minutes (or got distracted and let them set too long) before cooking. I personally have made these dumplings probably 50 times over the years and only the Einkorn version ever came out too firm and dense (and that one only twice sere too dense for my liking, as I recall). I don't believe the original version has come out dense one single time, in fact.

Here's a link to my linguine version of this noodle dough. They were hand-cut, as pasta machines are, for me, a hassle. In fact specialty machines of any kind I avoid like the plague for this reason and how much storage space they require. The fewer the better IMO. https://buttoni.wordpress.com/2014/...bster-linguine/.

If my husband weren't totally inept with anything mechanical, I'd do a video of this recipe. Sold my tripod because I never could set up the shots fast enough to eat my own meals before stone cold. So I have stuck with free-hand shooting. I take videos all the time of my dog, but the hubs, who also lives with an "essential tremor" in his right hand, probably could not learn how to use my digital camera or get a decent focus if his life depended on it. What can I say, he's just not talented that way. Heck, he's been using a computer for forum following and email for years and still doesn't know how to cut/paste or recognize half of what he is looking at on a screen. He has a mental block about computers and won't touch my camera. When I have him do so, I usually regret it later.