Gluten-free bread

May 7, 2017

Long long time ago, when we were beginning our adventure with bread, I wanted to try and bake something with a technical challenge. I quickly chose gluten-free bread.

Dawno dawno temu, kiedy rozpoczynaliśmy naszą przygodę z chlebem, chciałm spróbować upiec coś, co byłoby technicznym wyzwaniem. Szybko wybrałem chleb bezglutenowy.

What is it about gluten that changes so much? Some information will be in our post about it, but let me quickly say that It forms a flexible mesh holding the starch and everything else. When yeast and bacteria fart, all the gas stays within the mesh and makes it expand without escaping the structure. This makes the loaf rise.

A mixture of water and gluten-free flour is like mud. No structure is formed, and the bubbles just escape. After baking you end up with some flat and crumbly something. That’s why there are additional ingredients that try to behave like gluten – in this case it’s a mix of ground linseed and psyllium husks.

The first gluten-free bread I baked was so bad I threw it whole into a bin. After a couple tries I found this one. While it has it’s cons, it works pretty much every time. It’s time to share my secret recipe (almost – it’s not mine, and it’s publicly available in here). I removed sugar as I’m not a fan of adding sugar to bread, and replaced oat flour with millet, as friends who can eat a little gluten mentioned that non-gf-classified oats usually have a little too much of it.

Planning

It’s either a night-day or day-night flow. You make the levain and wait throughout the night, then let it rise through the day and bake it, or make the levain in the morning, the bread in the evening and bake in the morning.

Ingredients

Dry ingredients before mixing

Levain

80 g sorghum flour (I used to use brown rice flour, but sorghum tastes better)
110 g water
140 g brown rice sourdough

Wet mixture

Levain
10 g ground linseed
20 g psyllium husks
350 g water

The dough

Wet mixture
60 g millet flour
60 g potato flour
60 g corn flour
60 g teff flour (I used to use buckwheat flour but then learned I didn’t like it)
20 g sunflower seeds
20 g linseed
20 g sesame seeds
10 g chia seeds
10 g salt

Preparation

Mix the levain and leave to mature for about 8-12 hours
In a second bowl add all dry ingredients of the dough. Mix them and make sure you have no lumps left
When the levain is ready, in a third bowl add water to psyllium husks and ground linseed. Mix until they it forms a thick gel
A post shared by Breadcentric (@breadcentric) on Apr 19, 2017 at 10:26pm PDT
Combine the gel with levain and mix well
Add the wet mixture to the dry ingredients and mix until all try ingredients get incorporated. When I am having problems, I add a little bit of water to help myself
All ingredients combined into a dough
Place it in a loaf tin and leave it to rise for about 8-12 hours
Dough in a tin
Set your oven to 150 C degrees with fan. Know your oven
Cover the tin with kitchen foil. I make a dome so that the bread has some space to rise
Place it in the oven and bake for 70 minutes. Add steam. After 40 minutes remove the foil
Let it cool down on a cooling rack
Gluten-free sourdough

There are times when the bread has a nice crust, but there are times when it gets all white, like this time. I’m not really sure what causes it, but it doesn’t influence the bread, which is really nice and fluffy.

Gluten-free sourdough – the crumb

One thing I don’t really like about it is the mildly bitter taste coming from the rice flour. I’m thinking of replacing part of it. Also, I’m wondering what it would be like with guar gum it xanthan gum. I will be testing this at some point.

Update

It has been suggested to me that the bitterness may come from the buckwheat flour. I’ll check this as well, thank you Hannahalla!

Update 2017.06.06

I have tried replacing rice flour in the levain with sorghum flour and my impression is that the flavour has improved significantly, I don’t feel the bitterness any more and it is either a coincidence or this change also improved the look of the loaf.