Gluten-free bread, Experiment 1

It looks edible, at least.  This is my first attempt at gluten-free bread, and the crumb has worked out pretty well. It’s light, airy, and not what I expected, texture-wise, for gluten-free bread.  The taste? Well… These rolls ended up with an incredibly bitter aftertaste.  We’ll just call this experiment #1 and leave it at that.

I did learn a few interesting things along the way, however, which I thought might be worth sharing.

Lesson #0: Gluten Free Girl’s gum-free version of gluten-free bread is an excellent recipe to start with. 

Some of the ingredients aren’t readily available here in Australia, so I am on my own in terms of the final combination of flours, etc, I use. I’m also hoping to make a vegan version of this bread. I have relied on the weight ratios, etc, she uses in this recipe as a starting point.  At least as far as texture goes, I’m on the right track.

Lesson #1: It is possible to make gluten-free bread without weird ingredients.

Yes, “weird” may be a fairly subjective term in this case, but I tend to think that chia seeds are pretty easy to get. I used freshly ground chia seeds in this experiment; when you mix them with boiling water and let the mix cool, you get a stretchy, almost putty-like paste. The chia seed “slurry,” as Gluten Free Girl (a.k.a. Shauna) calls it, looks like this:

You can apparently use flax/linseed or psyllium husk in place of the chia seeds, both of which I intend to try. These ingredients work because they are all pretty high in dietary fiber, some portion of which forms long chains of sugars that can be used to stabilize foams. Bread, as it turns out, is essentially a set foam, so anything that helps foams set properly could work in gluten-free bread.

Lesson #2: Gluten-free dough is really wet. 

It does not feel like normal dough. There is no window-pane test, you will not create a nice, taut ball of dough, and you should add as little flour as possible. In fact, I followed my usual rule for scones and avoided working this dough more than I had to. I think it paid off in the end, as the bread ended up fairly light considering the ingredients I used.

Lesson #3: This bread looks funny when it rises.

Yes, that’s two hours after the dough was mixed. It did rise a bit, but not a lot, and definitely looked nothing like normal bread dough.  I was able to shape it easily enough, at least.

Lesson #4: Too much buckwheat does not a tasty bread make, perhaps? Or I need to be more careful about where I get my flour.

I stuck to the same flour:starch weight ratios defined by Gluten Free Girl (weight ratios really are the key to making a good loaf of bread in any situation), but I changed the flours (to millet, buckwheat) and the starches (to potato, tapioca). I definitely used a lot more buckwheat than most recipes I’ve found.  At first, I thought this might have been it, but then I remembered the last buckwheat noodles I cooked. They didn’t taste bitter at all, and they were all buckwheat. Perhaps my millet flour was bad? If so, well… Bad news for the co-op, because that’s where I got it.  I’ll have to do a taste test and see what I find.  As for the next experiment, I’ll try a different set and proportion of flours, but stick to a similar technique. I think I will also add some olive oil next time, just to make it taste a bit richer.

The verdict?

I’ll spare you the recipe. This one simply isn’t ready for release yet.

Forgive the photos. Our apartment is dark, and as is typical for Sydney, the only place I could store a light-box for photos is in the bathroom.