After a reasonable amount of internet reading I determined that two things were important: a) to beat the living daylights out of the mixture (it is not a dough) and b) the temperature of proofing needs to be high and consistent.
So first job - make a proofing box... Two plastic boxes, a cooling tray and an old light fitting later I developed this.
In the test, with the lid in place and insulated with two cushions, it reached 41°C...
Now for the mixture. In order not to be too complicated I followed the recipe on our bag of Doves Farm gluten free bread flour. I used our big mixer with the whisk attachment, yes the whisk, and I beat the hell out of the mixture. The results looked like this...
It went everywhere. It rose further still in the oven... more mess!! I think we need a bigger loaf tin although the recipe did say a 1 kg tin.
And the results...
A reasonable textured and tasting loaf...
Elizabeth has now tried it as a ham sandwich and as a toasted cheese sandwich and says...
"It's a good first attempt at this trickiest of challenges. The taste is ok and the texture better than any we have so far achieved. As far as gluten free goes, it's good!"
What we need now is a bigger loaf tin before the next attempt.
5 comments:
One thing you have managed to achieve is a nice brown crust. That's not so easy using GF flours according to Andrew Whitley (author of Bread Matters, my bread making bible with all the techie stuff in). He recommends always glazing and sprinkling with seeds to disguise the anaemic look. I've made reasonable GF bread for John from the Bread Matters recipe, but it's never really like the real thing.
Well done. I guess that fresh gluten free bread is very difficult to come by so perfecting this skill will be a bonus for Elizabeth.
How well does the bread freeze?
Congratulations!
So long as it tastes good I don't see why it has to look exactly like normal bread.
And now you have the breadcrumbs for the monkfish recipe! (You can probably freeze the bread crumbs quite easily for when you might need them.)
It looks like a very successful piece of engineering! My 1kg loaf tin isn't big enough (for cakes - Tim's the bread maker) either, so if you find a bigger one, please let me know!
According to Paul Hollywood, to get a good crust, when you put the bread in the oven at 210C put some water in a tray in the bottom of the oven. It does seem to work!
There are bigger loaf tins available in the UK. so I will probably import one when we next go back. If you want one PG let me know. C
Post a Comment