Thoughts on Baking Gluten Free bread

Tonight I'm baking a loaf of gluten free bread. It's been a while since I've had a fresh loaf, and it always tastes better fresh than pre-packaged from the store. I haven't had much time lately (with so many other things I've needed to make), so I'm making it from a mix. The best mix I've found for gluten free bread is from the company Schar. They advertise themselves as the #1 gluten free brand in Europe, and all their stuff is reliably delicious. Their pasta tastes like regular, their pre-packaged bread is the best I've had, and their "sandwich bread" mix is also delicious.


It's also very easy. Just add a little oil and water to the mix and yeast (also included in the mix package), pour into pan, and let rise till doubled. Then bake and you're done.

While baking a lot of gluten free goodies like cakes and cookies there isn't a lot different, beyond finding a good flour substitute for the wheat, when baking bread you have to completely rethink the chemistry. The reason our regular bread works the way it does, with the rising and the kneading is because all the gluten in the bread is what works in conjunction with the yeast to make all those little bubbles that trap the air. The gluten is what makes the bread elastic-y when you knead it, and the more you knead it the better it works.
With gluten-free bread, we've obviously taken out the gluten, so now we need something else to trap the yeast as it rises and make those nice little, evenly-distributed air bubbles that create the texture of the bread, turning it from a brick into a loaf.

You have to throw a lot of what your mom taught you to do when making bread, out the window. There are some new basic rules. Here are 5 Rules of baking Gluten Free bread:

1. Gluten Free bread dough is more like very thick, gooey batter than dough. It is very, very wet.
2. You never knead gluten free bread. 1) you can't, it wouldn't work. 2) no need! there's no gluten to get working.
3. Since you don't knead it, the rising time is often shorter - it just rises once in the pan you're going to bake it in.
4. Gluten Free bread needs a lot of moisture when it bakes, so putting a pan of water in the oven underneath the loaf to create a steamy environment helps.
5. You have to cool gluten free bread slowly and carefully or it sinks before the bubbles stabilize. 

These are just a few things that make bread baking with gluten free ingredients vastly different. It's still one of the biggest challenges for me to get right, but I've had reasonably success with several recipes so far. I've made white bread, cinnamon bread, and bread that tasted like whole wheat. I've also made pizza dough and sticky buns. Almost all of these I make from scratch.

The best news is, just because you are gluten free, you don't have to deprive yourself of warm, yeasty, yummy bread!