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Gluten-free bread

Gluten-free bread This is a guest post from the German baker I’m hooking up with…Dom, my own personal, wonderful, live-in baker! Over to him whilst I go stick my nose up to the oven where a fresh loaf is baking… There are several different ways to make your own bread. This recipe will guide you through one of them, my way, and afterwards I will give suggestions for some slight variations that I have tried out. Basically, all you need are some standard ingredients and with the rest you can play around everytime you make a new loaf. It takes some experience to prepare a nice, tasty dough, believe me :)

Gluten-free bread

Preparation Time 10 minutes

Cooking Time 45 minutes

Total Time 13 hours

Ingredients

  • 500g gluten-free oat flakes
  • 150g buckwheat flour
  • 150g quinoa flour
  • 150g millet flakes
  • 50g coconut flakes (optional)
  • 2 Tbsp sourdough
  • 1 handful seed mix

Cooking instructions

  1. First grind all flakes down to a flour using a blender. Then mix/blend in the other flours.
  2. Place 3/4 of the flour mix aside and mix the remaining 1/4 in a bowl together with water and sourdough until you have a slightly watery mixture. Let this pre-dough rest for about 12 hours (e.g. over night).
  3. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees.
  4. Now mix the pre-dough with the rest of the flour, add the seeds and knead the dough, slowly adding water as you go along until you have one homogeneous dough, which sticks to your hands a little bit (just like plasticine).
  5. Transfer the dough into a bread form and whip it in the oven for about 45 minutes.
The reason I use mainly (gluten free) oat flour is because it’s cheaper, if you’re loaded you can use any gluten-free alternative you like! I usually always add coconut flour (ground from coconut flakes) as it makes the bread really tasty and gives it an interesting edge. Pre-heating the oven means that the bread will come out a bit crustier. If you want it even crustier still, you can ‘flick’ a little bit of water over it before putting it in the oven and then again every 5-10 minutes. Using a food processor to knead the dough can save a lot of time. If you need to exercise your muscles, put some welly into it and do it by hand. Have a small glass of water next to you to dip in your sticky fingers into (this makes it easier to regulate the amount of water you may want to add when getting closer to reaching a nice consistency). If you have made bread before using white or any glutenous flour (any form of wheat, that means even spelt) you will know that that kind of dough usually expands up to twice its size during the proofing (resting) period. This is due to the gluten and the yeast (which is normally used when baking with wheat flour). As we are using gluten-free flour and sourdough here, the dough won’t rise, even after letting it rest. Although sourdough also contains yeast fungus, it apparently agrees much better with people who have allergies. You can either buy ready-made sourdough in any health food shop or you can make it yourself using baking ferment. The one we buy contains about 60g and gives instructions on how to prepare the sourdough. Preparing the sourdough takes about 30 hours (don’t worry, most of the time is letting it rest, or proof), but once done you can store it in the fridge for about 2 months and use it to make approximately 5-10 loaves of bread. In my seed mix mentioned above I usually have: pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, flaxseeds and sesame seeds. I’ve also had tasty results by adding either herbs (rosmary, thyme, cumin), cinnamon or left-over pulp from juicing. Of course you could add pretty much anything you like,  just follow your imagination and let me know what the outcome was! This post is part of Real Food Whole Health’s Fresh Bites Friday.