Somewhere between the bizarre synthetic squishiness of bleached and refined Wonder Bread and the brick-like crumbly coarseness of gluten-free bread lies a good loaf of nutritious and sliceable gluten-free bread. I don’t eat bread very often but every once in awhile I WANT A PIECE OF GOOD BREAD. Stomp, stomp. You know what I mean, I know you do.

I’ve been baking, searching, testing, and tasting for ages and have recently put aside my lovely and expensive Zojirushi bread machine and am making some wonderful hand-crafted breads from scratch. I’ve also been whipping up some amazing semi-hand-crafted loaves from premixed blends, which is easier, but not all that much. Meaning it’s not that hard to make it from scratch.

But, first off – bread machine or no bread machine? What do you think? Depends on how much time you have and whether you want to deal with doing it all yourself or not. Bread machines are great because you can just dump everything into the machine, set the controls, and take off for yoga class. When you return, your house smells incredible and you’ve had a good workout while Ms. Zojirushi was busy baking you a nice loaf of bread. Simple – but not as good as it could be.

The bottom line is, gluten-free bread should not be kneaded and most bread machines run through a kneading cycle. Kneading develops the gluten, and since we’re avoiding the stuff in the first place, there’s no need to knead. That’s why making GF bread by hand is so much easier than making a loaf containing gluten. You get to skip some major steps. See – aren’t we lucky little bakers?

No, you don’t think so?

Well, check this out. Hearty Whole Grain Bread that is as good as it gets. It’s our favorite uncle Bob’s version of whole grain bread from Bob’s Red Mill. But it works much better without Ms. Zojirushi messing with things – unless you can program her to skip the shimmy-shimmy pole dance at the beginning of the process.

That over-mixing makes for coarser and more crumbly bread. The loaf pictured below took all of about 30 seconds to mix, no more or you’ll be back to baking edible doorstops. You do have to dissolve the yeast in warm water, mix up a few ingredients and let the bread rise in the loaf pan for 45 minutes or so before baking, but that’s about it. Easy-peasy, as my favorite Brit would say.

what you need (this is all listed on the package)
1 package Bob’s Red Mill Hearty Whole Grain GF Bread Mix
1 3/4 cups water
1/4 cup oil (I use Earth Balance vegan butter, but any oil will do)
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
*sometimes I add 1 tablespoon of blackstrap molasses
*follow Bob’s package instructions for making by hand

Now onto a less hearty version of homemade bread. This one makes great sandwich bread, or toast, or French toast, or a real grilled cheese sandwich if you’re totally down in the dumps and need some comfort food, or – well you get the idea. It’s good stuff (see below).

what you need (again, all this is listed on the package)
1 package Bob’s Red Mill Homemade GF Bread Mix (I didn’t add the Wonderful in there, it’s the name of the bread, but I wholeheartedly agree)
1 2/3 cups warm milk (I use organic brown rice milk)
1 whole egg plus enough egg whites to equal 3/4 cup
1/4 cup melted butter or vegetable oil
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
*follow Bob’s instructions for making by hand

Yippee – real bread and you made it from scratch (sort of)!

In good health,
Melissa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Gluten-Free Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.