Gluten Free Baking- Large White Oven Loaf

Now term has started again, I'm living in a modest sized flat in Glasgow, with a very modest sized kitchen! Living at home over the summer, the kitchen I could use was rather large:-

This is the current kitchen in my flat:-

For this reason, it has been a lot more difficult to bake recently! Also, I don't have large amounts of space to store large amounts of flour. And my oven doesn't get very hot (175 degrees if your lucky). So I decided to bake my most consistently successful loaf. It doesn't taste particularly exciting, but the texture and fact it has always worked make it a good loaf. The main ingredient is glutafin select multipurpose white mix:

I get this on prescription and use it in a lot of recipes, and as my general flour for thickening sauces etc. It's worth pointing out that this mix contains wheat starch, which is not suitable people who are intolerant/ sensitive to wheat. The wheat starch is processed to remove the gluten, so of course it's still gluten free. It's also only available on prescription, available to anyone medically diagnosed with Coeliac's disease. The recipe can be found here as can a lot of other recipes specifically designed for this flour. 

This is what the ingredients looked like:

The recipe is quite simple, first, mix up the dry ingredients:

Then, stir in the wet ingredients:

Put it into the loaf tin, this is what it looked like before around 20-25 minutes of rising:

And after rising:

I then baked it for about 35 minutes. It came out looking like this:

This is what it looked like cut, and a slice of it:

The loaf had a very nice texture, very fluffy, light and springy and had risen very well. A lot of shop bought gluten free loaves are very small, so it's nice to have something more normal bread sized to make sandwiches etc. The flavour was quite nice, but it didn't really taste of much. You could taste the olive oil, which was quite peppery and the dried milk as well, which is a bit odd. 

The best thing about this loaf is that it's easy and quick to make, and fills me up more than smaller loaves.

Rock Lobster, Glasgow Restaurant Review

We stumbled across this incredibly gluten free friendly restaurant whilst wondering around looking for a specific shoe shop, and being admittedly a little lost.

I noticed a sign which said 'gluten free fish and chips' which was quite exciting! It lead to Rock Lobster which is situated in a quiet, quirky court in the trendy Merchant City area.

We booked online so we could make use of the 5pm offer, which was 2 courses and a glass of house wine for £11.95.

For my starter I ordered the Buffalo meatballs with blushed tomato & veal bone sauce and had the Spicy beer battered fish & chips with spaghetti style coleslaw.
I'm always nervous when something says it contains beer and is gluten free, as clearly beer isn't usually gluten free. The most likely explanation is that the gluten free version is a batter without beer. I double checked with the chef, just to be sure, and he confirmed it was gluten free (although I didn't expressly ask why it said beer batter on the menu).

*STOP PRESS* Rock Lobster have just confirmed that they in fact use the Estrella gluten free lager in their beer batter for the fish. 

The starter was really tasty, but really was just meatballs. The sauce was really nice but I could have done with something to mop it up with. Perhaps some gluten free bread or a few chips or something. Here it is: 

Meatballs aren't really something it's easy to photo and make them look appealing, but trust me, they were very tasty.

The fish and chips was the star of the show, especially the chips in fact, which were covered in a very tasty peppery seasoning. Here are the fish and chips:

The batter was crisp and yellow, presumably due to turmeric being present in the spice mix. It also contained herbs, which I think were coriander, giving it a refreshing sharp citrus flavour. The fish was perfectly complimented by the delicious chips and a glass of crisp white wine. Even the coleslaw was nice, which is something I usually leave due to my carrot allergy but this was a nice cabbage only version. 

Overall, I would highly recommend Rock Lobster to everyone, particularly those avoiding gluten. I will be back to try the gluten free gnocchi! Something that really should be gluten free anyway, given that it's mainly made of potatoes, but people tend to add wheatflour.