A’S HOLISTIC PANTRY #8 – If you can’t eat gluten, you must have also experienced that substituting bread and baked goods is the biggest challenge. In most shops you can’t get gluten-free products, and if you can, it’s usually low-quality, packaged and preserved ‘artificial’ bread, sold for the price of gold. Their taste and texture are also not the real thing, and it’ also quite doubtful how healthy these breads are at all.

The base ingredient of all gluten-free bread on the market is most often some kind of starch. Starch is not a bad base ingredient, and it’s actually quite useful when you cook gluten-free. It still isn’t a great idea to eat a lot of bread baked from it because these products have a very high glycemic index and a very low fiber and vitamin content. So, they’re not the best choice when we want to eat healthy bread. The other big problem is that most of these baked goods appear as preserved food on the shelves. Preservatives sneak into our kitchens anyway, so it’s really not necessary to consume them with baked goods too, especially as baked goods are best when fresh. Isn’t this a huge contradiction?

So, it’s better if we join the bread revolution despite our gluten-free diets and learn how we can bake nutritious, good bread from good ingredients, at home, investing just a little time, money and energy. And gluten-free.
The first step is choosing the right base ingredients. Good news is that although we have to forget good old wheat for a while now, there are loads of nutritious, healthy kinds of flour we can use, and all we have to do is pick the one we want.

Oat Flour

Essentially, oats don’t contain gluten. For a long time we listed them as glutenous ingredients nevertheless, because the mill industry traditionally treat them together with wheat, “contaminating” oats with gluten. Luckily, gluten-free ingredients have become so popular and valuable by now that it pays for the mill industry to treat oats separately from wheat, and so there is already gluten-free oatmeal, oat flour and oatmeal flour on the market. Buy products that are labeled gluten-free because the other brands don’t guarantee that the oats have not come into contact with wheat.

Rice flour

Cheap and widely used. When you’re cooking, it’s truly a jolly joker, because we can easily and quickly thicken food of any taste with it. An extra bonus is that it doesn’t form lumps even when added to hot food, so it’s an easy and quick way to thicken vegetable stews, soups even at the end of cooking. It’s not so practical when baking though, because if we want to bake cookies, bread using only rice flour, the end result will be like sawdust, powdery, crumbly. Therefore, you have to combine it other kinds of flour. Another disadvantage is that it has a very high starch content and glycemic index too. This is why it’s better to use its brown version.

Brown rice flour

Also cheap, readily available flour. Its usability is same as with white flour. Its advantage compared to the white rice flour is that its glycemic index is lower, it contains more fiber.

Corn flour

Presently this is the cheapest kind of gluten-free flour in most parts of the world. Using it by itself it is hard (or rather impossible) to make great baked goods from it, but combined with other kinds of flour it is a great base ingredient. It’s great for cooking too. It’s common knowledge that the rightly popular tortilla is made from cornflour. This is not exactly true, because traditionally tortilla is made from a special form of corn flour called masa harina.

Masa harina

Masa harina is a traditional Mexican ingredient, a special kind of corn flour. In Spanish the name literally means ‘dough flour’. If you want to make really good tortillas, you should use this. They dry the field corn and then treat it with a solution of lime and water. It softens the corn and loosens the hulls from the kernels. It is then washed and the wet corn is ground into a dough, dried and finely ground into a powder. Masa harina cannot be substituted by corn flour or starch because they have different qualities. Masa harina is a flour with a much higher protein content, so dough kneaded from it is much softer, crispier, and easier to work with. It’s great to have in your pantry because you can make many kinds of delicacies with it, besides tortilla, and my experience is that this is one of the best gluten-free flours to cook with, so I can especially recommend it to beginners as well.

Buckwheat flour

Buckwheat is an ancient, healthy crop that has grain-like seeds. We can use these seeds in a variety of ways for baking and cooking, and flour is also made from them. Its medium brown color, whole-grain flour is packed full of valuable vitamins. It has a characteristic, nutty taste, which many people don’t like, unfortunately. Nevertheless, you still should add a bit to your bread, first of all, because it is very healthy, secondly, it does not contain gluten, and you can make quite delicious, loose dough from it. If you don’t want the buckwheat flavor to dominate your bread, use a 25-30% ratio combined with other kinds of flour. If you like how it tastes, you can freely use larger quantities.

Other very healthy and great base ingredients are chickpea flour and millet flour. I personally use these less frequently, and find them useful mainly for cooking, but mixed with other kinds of flour, you can use them for baking bread too. They are not too expensive, easy to find and guaranteed gluten-free.

You can also use various starches for baking bread, like corn starch, potato starch, tapioca starch. Due to the above mentioned reasons, I don’t recommend that you use a lot of starches for your bread, though. If you add a little to your dough, it will make it easier to work with and make a well-structured bread dough, but don’t overdo it, because the more starchy your loaf is, the less nutritious it will be and the more it will count as empty calories, fattening food.

Experiment boldly, find the basic bread recipe that is the best for you. I’d like to give you a few tips to spare you from making extra rounds, and give you my own basic bread recipe, which is a good starting point for your experiments.

General advice for baking gluten-free bread

1. Know why gluten-free baking is so different

In order to understand what the difference is between gluten-free and non-gluten-free bread baking, first we have to understand what role gluten plays in baking. In food made from flours that contain gluten (flour from wheat, rye, durum, spelt), gluten acts as a binder, a “glue”. Its name also originates from the Latin word “gluten”, meaning glue. When you’re kneading dough, the gluten, or in other words, the aleurone content of flour is what makes it kneadable, shapeable and flexible. So, now you understand why you can’t get the same results with any kind of gluten-free flour. No need to worry though, because you can bake delicious, soft bread, pizza dough, raised cakes from gluten-free flours. You just have to know about the additives that you don’t need when using wheat flour, but that substitute the gluey nature of gluten. And, of course, you have to do certain things in a slightly different way, in a gluten-free way, that is.

2. Mix the flours!

When I was still a beginner, I also made the mistake of trying to make dough from a single kind of gluten-free flour, thinking along the principle of “you can make any kind of dough with wheat flour”. Needles to say: I was never successful. After many fails, experiments and hours of reading up on the subject, I realized: you have to mix gluten-free flours if you want to make really tasty dough. Of course there are exceptions: you can prepare many of the flatbreads, pancakes found in distant peoples’ kitchens by using a single kind of flour, like Mexican tortillas from masa harina, French socca from chickpea flour or Ethiopian injera from teff flour. If you want to bake bread or cakes, however, mix two-three or even more kinds of flour, this is your road to success.
There are no golden rules for the proportions and mixing, any version could work, but there are certain rules worth sticking to. The ratio of low glycemic index to high glycemic index flour should be about 50-50%. If you add more of the low glycemic index flour, your bread will be too thick, bitterish, and if the high glycemic index flour is dominant, then the bread’s fiber content is too low and not too beneficial for your blood sugar levels.

3. Use ‘glue’!

As I’ve already mentioned, we have to substitute the gluey effect of gluten somehow, because gluten-free flours do not contain anything that might do the job. If you don’t use “glueing agents”, and stick to the flour-water-yeast method, your dough will be inflexible, dry and crumbly. If you’re lucky, it won’t taste bad, and you’ll be able to eat it too, but it won’t be a great pleasure, and it is pretty bothersome to clean up all the crumbs it leaves around. I experimented long-long months until I managed to bake truly delicious, good-textured bread. I’ve tried out many additives, had bad experiences with many of them, so now I am only going to share three kinds of additives that finally worked for me. I have to warn you in advance that you’ll be seeing some scary names, but there’s nothing to be afraid of, I wouldn’t recommend any of these additives if they were harmful in any way.

ASCORBIC ACID Many of you probably know that ascorbic acid is the uglier name of vitamin C, and we also know that vitamin C is a good thing. But how does it get into bread?It’s not so much for its “glueing” properties that we add it, but rather to secure a successful raising of the dough. When ascorbic acid meets yeast, it starts working and helps raise and make the dough lighter. We can use this trick with wheat flour breads too, it will make them tastier and the end results will be more beautiful. For one bread use just 1-2 pinches.

XANTHAN GUM Because of its terribly ugly name many people avoid even trying it. However, if you read up on it a bit, you’ll find out that xanthan gum is not an artificially produced chemical substance, but an interesting invention of nature itself. It is produced by a strain of bacteria called Xanthomonas campestris during the fermentation process of sugars. Xanthan is therefore a natural polysaccharide, which gets to our kitchens in the form of white powder and is a great thickening and bulking agent due to its water holding ability. It gives great structure to dough. It closes up water bubbles really well, so even your gluten-free bread will be flexible, loose, soft. It has no taste of its own. Generally, 1-2 teaspoons are enough for a loaf of bread.

GUAR SEED FLOUR This is also a naturally occurring polysaccharide, made from the proteins feeding the guar bean germ. Most of the world’s guar beans grow in India, so most of the guar seed flour also comes from here to the rest of the world. In its kitchen-ready form it is a light grey or whitish powder. In 2007 there was huge panic in Europe when dioxin-contaminated guar seed flour arrived on the market. Since then the name guar doesn’t sound too good. Luckily though, we don’t have to fear dioxin contamination because it was not caused by humans, but by a widespread forest fire. The fire has been extinguished since then, so there’s nothing to worry about. Guar seed flour exported to Europe is also thoroughly tested, so we are safe. The amount to use is also 1-2 teaspoons of it per bread, just like with xanthan, and it acts as a gluing, bulking agent and gluten substitute just as well. Since guar seed flour is actually a water swelling, indigestible dietary fiber, it helps the healthy function of our digestive system, binds toxins in the intestines and helps carry them out quickly from the body.

4. Be careful with the liquid!

Due to its lack of gluten, the water absorbing ability of gluten-free rice is different from what we are used to with wheat flour. If we add water to it too quickly, we can easily over-water the dough and end up with an unmanageable, runny mass. This is why we have to add the liquid to the dough even more carefully and more slowly than when baking bread with wheat flour. Keep mixing the dough and stop after each drizzle of water that you add to it, wait for the flours to soak in the actual dose, and if it’s still too dry, carefully add some more water. Keep on doing this until you get the desired texture and shape. In case of baking bread, you have to get a thick, dumpling dough texture, which is moist everywhere, but is not runny, it can be shaped and sets into the form of a bun.

5. Use spices!

Gluten-free flours can be a bit bitter depending on what types you use. So that your bread made from them doesn’t have a tart flavor, add spices to the dough! Garlic, rosemary, basil or oregano add a great taste to your bread, but you can experiment with any spices to your taste, don’t be afraid to use your imagination, discover the flavor you like the most!

6. Raise the dough in a humid environment!

While with wheat flour bread it’s enough simply to throw a kitchen cloth on the bowl, gluten-free dough rises more nicely, has a better texture if you raise it in a humid environment. It’s best to use a raising bowl with a plastic lid, but if you don’t have one at home, there’s another solution: cover your bowl carefully with fresh-keeping foil and throw a kitchen cloth on top of it. After this, all you need is room temperature, and to let your dough rest away from direct sunlight. The end results will be beautiful due to the humidity resulting from the interaction between the foil and the rising dough.

7. Let your dough rest!

Gluten-free bread dough rises more slowly and less easily, it’s harder to get an airy, loose texture, than with wheat flour bread. But if you’re patient enough, it will turn out beautifully. My experience is that the dough needs to rest for at least 8, max 16 hours in the above mentioned humid environment, and then the bread will be deliciously fluffy, but with a crispy crust.

8. When shaping the dough, don’t flour, wet your hands!

If your dough has risen and rested enough, but has lost its bun shape in the meantime, don’t panic! This is a totally natural part of the process with gluten-free baking, because due to the lack of a gluten frame, the structure is not as stable as with wheat flour bread. All you have to do is take the dough from the bowl, put it on a piece of parchment paper and, while wetting your hands continuously, smooth it into a bun shape. You’ll see how obediently the dough yields under your wet hands.

9. Heat the bread pan before you put the bread in it!

Half an hour before you start baking the bread, turn your oven on (230°C temp is usually the best) and place the pan in which you’re going to bake the bread inside the oven. If the oven and the pan have heated up, put the bread into the pan, cover it and bake for about 20 minutes, then remove the lid and bake it like that until it is the desired color and texture. Depending on the flours that you use and the size of the bread, baking time is about 45-70 minutes.

Basil-garlic gluten-free bun (basic recipe)

Ingredients:

2 cups rice flour
1 cup gluten-free oat flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
2 teaspoons of yeast
1,5 teaspoons of xanthan gum
2 pinches of ascorbic acid
3 spoons of olive oil + 1 spoon for the top of the bread before baking
1,5-2 cups warm water (to get the right quantity please read my advice above)
Salt and other spices to taste (I used basil and garlic, but you can spice up the bun any way you like)

Preparation: In a deep mixer bowl, or a raising bowl with a lid, mix the dry ingredients. If you’re done with that, add the oil and start adding the water, nice and slow, while you keep mixing the dough. Stop adding the warm water when your dough is equally moist everywhere, can be shaped easily, but it’s not runny yet. Info for advanced level: you have to get a thick ‘nokedli’ dumpling dough texture.

If you’re done with that, cover your bowl with fresh-keeping foil with a kitchen cloth on top (if you’re using a raising bowl, juts put the lid on). Rest the dough for 8-12 hours away from direct sunlight on room temperature.
If the time is up, turn on your oven, put in the pan you’d like to bake your bun in, and heat up the oven to 190-230°C.

Wet your hands and place your dough on the parchment paper, and while you keeping your hands wet, smooth it into a bun shape, then place it into the pan together with parchment paper. Drizzle the spoon of olive oil on top and it’s ready to go into the oven.

Bake it with a lid on for 20 minutes, then remove the lid and bake it for another 30-40 minutes until it is nice and golden brown, and baked through.

Eating is joy, cooking is magic.
With love:

A.