A very good friend of mine is, and dismayed by the generally poor quality/edibility of commercially available baked goods, particularly bread, I decided that it simply must be possible to make gluten-free bread that tastes and looks ‘right’
Now as you may well know, it’s the gluten that makes bread what it is; it’s the gluten that forms a network of ‘strands’ that traps all the little bubbles of CO[sup]2[/sup] given off by the yeast.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’m making very good progress; tonight I baked a batch of rolls that are fairly light and definitely as springy as ‘real’ bread - when cut or torn (yes, they tear, not crumble), they have almost exactly the texture of ordinary bread, the taste isn’t quite right, but it’s not at all bad.
I’ve achieved this by experimenting with a number of ingredients; to start with, I use a proprietary blended gluten-free flour, but crucially one that includes Tapioca starch - tapioca has a sticky texture not unlike the gluten in wheat (the flour blend also contains potato and rice flours, but no corn).
Next I add a small amount of soya flour (maybe to make up about 5% of the total flour bulk, not the defatted sort; this smells slightly odd when raw, but when cooked, it lends a definitely ‘wheaty’ taste to the end product, soya flour is also very light, so it partly counteracts the excessive ‘density’ of the gluten free flour.
Next, a teaspoon of powdered Xanthan gum to every eight ounces of dry mix; again, this has a sticky texture that mimics the gluten.
Then the yeast, sugar, salt, whatever else.
So, nothing particularly new so far, but now the secret ingredient; instead of using water or milk to moisten the dry mix, I use mashed cooked pumpkin; it makes a BIG difference; cooked pumpkin is a mass of tiny soft fibres up to five millimetres long - these seem to bind to the starch grains and hold the whole thing together; you have to mash the cooked pumpkin by hand, as a food processor will very likely cut the fibres into short pieces.
The other benefit of the pumpkin is that it seems to keep the end product more moist than normal (gluten free baking seems often to be rather dry in the mouth).
I don’t add any other liquid, just the sloppy pumpkin mix until I acheieve a soft batter consistency (if you make an ordinary dough, it won’t work), then pipe the batter through a thin nozzle to make an untidy heap of mixture; the act of having piped it instead of spooning means that you can smooth the heap into a lump with an oiled knife and you trap lots of tiny air pockets between the piled-up piped strands.
I let it prove for half an hour, then bake as normal.
I’ll try to work out a formal recipe soon, but I thought the ‘rough guide’ might be helpful to anyone else experimenting in this arena.
I happened upon the pumpkin thing when making a pumpkin loaf with ordinary wheat-based flour, I noticed that the dough was noticeably more ‘stringy’ than other batches I hade made from the same flour without pumpkin.