I got the recipe book ‘Gluten Free on a Shoestring (GFOAS) Bakes Bread’ for Christmas, it’s written by Nicole Hunn, author of the blog by the same name. The recipes are vastly different from those I’ve tried
before, which were mainly using a batter. It took me a LONG time to compile the
ingredients and cost A LOT of money! I had purchased almost all the
ingredients, including whey protein isolate which cost around £13 (enough to
make ~2 loaves), when I realised that one of the ingredients, expandex modified
tapioca starch, is not available in Europe! I really thought that was the end
of the road for a time, until I read here (number 6) about the replacement, Ultratex, which cost about £23 including
delivery! However, I have only used a miniscule amount so far. So I mixed up my
gluten free flours in a large tub, and headed back to Glasgow ready to bake my first loaf. I’d decided on the loaf ‘Lean Crusty White Sandwich Bread’, because it
said that it was going to change my life! Reading through the recipe I
encountered another problem- one of the stages requires a bowl of dough to be
left in the fridge for 12 hours-5 days. Which means that I had to carefully
coordinate everything to when my flatmate and I had an almost empty fridge!
So first I had to make a starter, which was basically the flour mix,
yeast, sugar and warm water whisked up. This is what it looked like:
I left it in a warm place for about 40 minutes and it grew
into this:
I mixed the remaining dry ingredients:
And added the starter to them:
This is where I met my next problem which, ultimately, lead to
my downfall. I was supposed to knead the dough in a stand mixer with a dough hook. I don’t have a
stand mixer, so I had to improvise. The book suggested using a wooden spoon. I
put the ingredients for the dough into a bowl and attempted to mix them with a
wooden spoon. It really wasn’t possible; it was like trying to stir play dough- something that is basically solid. I opted instead for kneading by hand; the
mixture was so sticky I didn’t dare put it onto my work surface. I air kneaded
the dough, which basically involved pulling it apart with my hands and pushing
it back together again. I did this for a full 10 minutes! I could feel it
drying on my hands, like a clay facemask, but I persisted because I felt like
kneading by hand for 10 minutes was roughly equivalent to kneading on medium
speed in a machine for 5 minutes. Of course, the problem was my hands were hot,
whilst a dough hook would be fairly cold. I wasn’t really sure what the dough
should feel like at this point, so I carried on, and put it into an oiled bowl
in the fridge for about 36 hours:
When I was ready to bake, I greased my baking ‘tin’:
This is what my dough looked like before I got going:
I added a bit more flour and turned it over on itself a few
times, as per the instructions, and managed to shape the dough fairly
successfully:
I then set it aside for rising:
I left it for about 2 ½ hours, it hadn’t quite risen to the
top of the tin, but I didn’t want to leave it any longer because the recipe
said only around 1 ½ hours:
I made the slash and it was ready for the oven:
To cook it I had to put it in the cold oven and then turn the oven on, which I was a bit worried about but it turned out ok. Here it is just after cooking:
This is the loaf out of its tin:
It certainly looked the part, and smelt good. However, it’s
when I tried to cut the loaf that my heart sank. It was hard, really hard, to
cut through. This is what it looked like inside:
It had a very dense crumb and was pretty dry. The texture
was pretty bad if I’m honest, really dry and stale-like. The crust was pretty
good, and the flavour was very good. It tasted just like bread! The flavour was
quite sweet and yeasty, with a slightly acidic tanginess. This is what a single
slice looks like:
Overall, I’m very disappointed. The book is called gluten
free on a shoestring, meaning cheap, and this is far from it! It’s hard to
estimate the real cost per loaf because I used different amounts of each flour,
but it can’t have been far off £10! I get gluten free food on prescription, and
living in Scotland there’s no prescription charge, so a loaf has to be really
special for it to be worth forking out on time and time again. It just didn’t
live up to my expectation of it, as a lean crusty white tasty loaf. Now I’m
left with around enough mix to make one more loaf from this book, and I don’t
know what to do with it! I don’t want to be disappointed again, I want to bake
something that’s going to work!
