I wanted to try bread from a different recipe book to see if
it was more successful, so I made the seven grain bread from ‘Gluten Free
Baking’ by Michael McCamley. The basic recipe was very similar to previous
ones, mix the dry ingredients:
Mix the wet ingredients:
And then add the dry to the wet. At this point the dough was
very firm and stiff, whilst the recipe stated it should be soft dough.
Nevertheless I allowed it to rise for about an hour in the tin:
However, after an hour the dough hadn’t risen at all, it was
still at exactly the same height. I decided I needed to add more water to allow
the dough the looseness required to rise. So I added more water and remixed the
dough, unfortunately I forgot to measure how much extra water I ended up
adding. This is what it looked like after I added more water:
The dough was slightly paler because the yellow from the egg
yolks had been diluted more. This time the dough actually rose in the hour:
I baked it at 180C for about 50 minutes. This is what it
looked like when it came out:
The crust had gone golden brown and hard, which was
promising. The loaf was fairly difficult to slice, which implied that the crust
would be nice and crunchy. Here it is cut open:
The crust was not actually that crunchy to eat, so maybe the
loaf could have done with a bit more cooking. The crumb was quite dense and moist,
so the loaf might have benefited from further rising time, and possibly more
yeast. However, the denseness was beneficial in preventing loaf from falling
apart. The taste was very good, quite nutty, complex with a hint of sweetness. The
flavour of the eggs came through but was by no means overpowering the other
flavours. Overall the loaf was good, but the recipe was fundamentally flawed,
if I hadn’t added in my own liquid then the loaf would have been very dense. It’s
important to be prepared to experiment and improvise when baking gluten free-
even when following a recipe!
