Baking: Gluten-Free Daily Bread

As promised in my last post of 2018 (lo, these many months ago), I've been working on developing a gluten-free bread recipe. I think I finally have it at a point where it's good enough to share.

I know there's an awful lot of perfectly good GF bread recipes out there in the world already, but I wanted one that fit the following criteria:

• Has a flavor
• Isn't gummy
• Doesn't fall apart if you look at it the wrong way
• Is made predominantly of whole grains rather than starches
• Doesn't require a proprietary store-bought blend of flours
• Doesn't require a homemade flour blend that needs to be mixed in bulk in advance
• Quick and easy enough to prepare on a weeknight, and/or multiple weeknights in a row, viz.
• Doesn't require an electric mixer
• Gets very few dishes and measuring cups dirty

In addition, it's egg-free, gum-free, and can be made vegan. I don't have a problem eating eggs, gum, or dairy, but raw eggs in dough can potentially get a bit dodgy if you're letting sourdough rise for 8-12 hours, and gums require lots of electrified mixing in order to be effective.

The result is denser than store-bought bread, but not Dwarf-bread dense, and full of whole-grain flavor that goes equally well with sweet or savory accompaniments. For the first 48 hours or so, it's sturdy and flexible enough to slice for sandwiches. After that, it starts to crack more easily, but is still nice when toasted and slathered with butter, or eaten with soup.

Milk Kefir Sourdough Starter

In my Universal Pancake Recipe, I mentioned that a little milk kefir mixed with flour makes a good, low-commitment sourdough starter. Today, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about how that works, and how to make and maintain your starter.

Let's start with the basics: What is sourdough?

For the purposes of this blog, sourdough is any dough which uses a starter culture containing a diverse mixture of wild yeasts and bacteria. Store-bought yeasts consist of a near-monoculture of the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the same species as the yeast used for brewing beer, but a different strain). A sourdough starter contains both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and lactobacillus bacteria (the same stuff that makes lacto-fermented pickles and turns milk into yogurt). Unless you are growing your culture in a tightly controlled laboratory environment, it will also become home to lots of other types of wild yeast and bacteria, creating its own little ecosystem.

Weekend update, 20-21 January

Food:
I was so pleased with the success of last weekend's sourdough loaf that I decided to try again. Twice. Once midweek, and once on the weekend, with different flour substitutions each time.

The first batch had 1 cup sorghum flour, 1 cup cassava flour, 3/4 cup arrowroot starch, and a bit of millet flour left over from another recipe. The second batch used sugar in place of honey, and about 1/2 cup each of millet, sorghum, cassava, and brown rice flour, with 3/4 cup of arrowroot starch again.

Arrowroot starch is supposed to behave similarly to tapioca, but less gummy/binding and more crunchy. The original recipe was, if anything, a little bit too stiff, which is why I swapped in arrowroot for tapioca starch. And because I'd never used it before, and wanted to see how it turned out. Millet flour also bakes up quite crunchy, and the loaf does indeed have a very crunchy crust, with a soft, very moist interior. I swapped in the cassava flour (made from the same stuff as tapioca starch) because it's tasty, and to make up for the loss of the sticky tapioca starch.

Gluten free waffles!

Both batches came out much closer in flavor to an ordinary sourdough white bread, although the first batch had a little more sweetness than I would have liked, hence the substitution of sugar for honey and reducing the quantity of sorghum flour in the second batch.

Also, I made waffles. Just because I could. At some point, I will write up my universal pancake/waffle recipe.

Garden:
It was raining most of the weekend, so not much happened. Steve planted a bunch of garlic during a brief dry spell. We rolled the compost a bit, but it's a bit smelly so something clearly isn't right. I tore up some more paper and cardboard and added it to the roller. I also started updating our seed inventory for the current year.

Decorative seam treatment on smokkr.

Crafts:
I stitched a few more rounds on my naalbinding mitts, and a few inches of decorative seam treatments on my Viking smokkr. I've run out of dark blue embroidery floss though, so I'll need to stop by a craft shop this week.

House:
During the heaviest rains this weekend, I noticed that we had water dripping from our conservatory ceiling. Luckily, we basically just use our conservatory as a greenhouse, so there are very few things in it that could be damaged by a bit of water. But it does mean that we need to find somebody to come and do some repairs. Bleh.