Gluten Free Baking: GFOASS- lean crusty white sandwich bread

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!