For Christmas I was given the Gluten-Free and Vegan Bread recipe book by Jennifer Katzinger. I was worried that the fact it is American would mean the ingredients would be hard to come by. I managed to buy all the ingredients from healthysupplies.co.uk. Each recipe called for up to 10 different flours, so the order came up to over £40! I actually quite enjoyed using cups compared to weighing things out and found it easy enough to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius.
Quinoa Sandwich Loaf
I started off by making the Quinoa Sandwich loaf from page 41 because I wanted to make something basic and loaf shaped to start with. The ingredients are shown below- there's a lot of them!
The recipe was relatively straight forward to follow- mix all the dry ingredients together, mix the yeast with the water, add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, mix and bake! This was the first occasion I came across the wander of chia seeds. These tiny black seeds transform into a thick gelatin when soaked in water for just 15 minutes. This acts as a binding agent in the bread.
For fear that my mums well used bread tins were contaminated with gluten I lined them with greaseproof paper. The loaf cooked for a whole 2 hours 30 mins, and had no proving time for the dough to rise first. Here is a picture of it just before cooking:
After cooking the loaf was crusty and brown- here it is just after:
Unfortunately the paper had stuck to the loaf and wouldn't really come off. I didn't notice it much when I ate it. This is it cut open:
It had a fairly even crumb. The texture was quite sticky and moist which held the bread together and would allow is to be made into a sandwich. The taste was very good, nutty and malty. The crust was quite brown and crispy. If anything the bread was a little too wet but overall a very good start.
Pain de Campagne
Next I made the Pain de Campagne from page 30. I was keen to try out a loaf that required shaping. Again the recipe was very easy to follow. The only trouble was that arrowroot was in very small packets of only 100 grams, and I required a whole cup. This was therefore very expensive, I have now found arrowroot from essential wholefoods in a 500 gram packet, which is much better value.
These are them having just been put in the oven, they're quite small, about the size of two fists together.
This is it just after cooking, as you can see it hasn't risen all that much.
Here it is cut open- which wasn't easy!
Cutting the bread took a lot of tricky sawing- even with a very sharp knife. The crust was very thick and difficult to bite through. In my opinion the taste was very good- even better than the quinoa loaf but some friends preferred the taste of the quinoa. The taste was quite nutty and fibery, the outer cornmeal dusting produced a nice flavour and texture. The texture was moist and a bit too dense- this may be due to the yeast not working properly.
Unfortunately the crust was just too tough in to eat as the bread got older and I have now had to throw the last bit away.
A mixed response but definitely an interesting start. Coming next, Focaccia, watch this space!
No comments:
Post a Comment