The Quest for a Wheat-free bread with just pantry staples

I don't know about you, at least assuming you don't own a health food store or haven't been eating gluten free for a while, but I don't usually stock Xanthan gum, rice flour, or all the hundred other 'gluten free' baking essentials, nor is the 'gluten free baking flour' all that appealing at $5/pound.  Can I make an edible wheat-free bread with stuff I already have on hand?  I'd really like to try one of these recipes and add vital wheat gluten (I can have gluten but not wheat, weird I know!) and see what happens, but until I get some I'll content myself with what I have on hand.

The problem with oat flour is it gets heavy and doesn't hold a 'poof' very well, that's my scientific word for trapping air bubbles from the leavening agents, it also gets really crumbly after baking, basically all the reasons you need gluten formed from wheat flour and why we love real bread: light, fluffy, soft.  The oats will give it a more rustic or 'artisan' bread feel, which gave me an idea.  I used to heat the oven up to 450 degrees (F) with my cast iron dutch oven inside, then I'd plop a ball of regular dough in there, slam on the lid and bake it to make a wonderful 'artisan' type loaf.  It's a technique I found somewhere on the inter web.  The theory is the extreme heat releases moisture from the dough, traps it inside with the lid, and somehow it makes a crusty crust, a soft inside, and makes the loaf nice and tall.  My poor oat bread needs all the help it can get, I'm very good at making rocks at the moment.  I also could use eggs as a leavening agent and to help bind stuff together and cornstarch might also help in that aspect.  So I went looking for a recipe with those ingredients to try my dutch oven/high temp technique.

I found this recipe and modified it since I didn't have rice flour or Xanthan gum, basically increasing the oats and cornstarch respectively.  Instead of putting it in a loaf pan, I just left it in the mixer bowl after scraping it into a ball, put a towel on top and let it rise in a warm over for an hour or so.  I preheated the oven/dutch oven to 450 and when everything was ready, opened the lid on the dutch oven, scraped in the dough ball in one solid mass, slammed on the lid, threw it in the oven and baked it for about 20 minutes (I quartered the recipe, if you halved it it would likely be around 26 minutes in my oven, I wouldn't do more than that in one baking though or it might never get done!).  It came out looking for all the world like a little artisan loaf.  It actually sliced very nicely (let it cool wrapped in a towel) and didn't crumble.  It is rather dense and moist, but not in a rock sort of way.  Even when I do wheat bread with this method the texture tends to be denser and moister than regular bread, so not unexpected, especially using oats.  Probably too heavy to use as sandwich bread unless you go open face but I bet it will make dandy toast!  Overall, not a bad result for having no idea what I'm doing!

***Okay, while this did produce a nicely sliceable loaf with decent height, I made the mistake of making real bagels for the rest of the family and trying a slice of this bread toasted, it was rather pathetic compared to the real thing.  Personally, I will give up the quest to seek a bread substitute, I don't think there is one to replace real wheat and the loveliness of real gluten-y bread.  The dough is certainly more fun to work with than the pathetic batter like stuff I'm now doing and I'd rather live without than with a poor imitation, sort of like soy cheese, ugh!  I applaud those who are determined to press onward in the quest, but personally, I am too fond of the memory of good bread to try and pretend anything else even comes close.***

Adventures and misadventures with oat flour

I've recently went wheat-less, not because of some fashionable trend or because there is anything innately wrong with wheat, rather after 10 years of excuses and foot dragging, I finally got tested for food sensitivity and wheat came up as a big no no, ugh, I love bread!  The non-wheat 'flours' at my local grocery store are atrociously priced and I'm not big on 'fake' substitutions, like the 'non-dairy milks' are anything but appetizing, the same with the soy cheese, etc.  But I did find one alternative that is both appetizing and reasonably priced: oat flour.  All you need is a giant canister of oatmeal and a blender/food processor/grinder and you've got oat flour.  I only grind as much as I need and keep any extra in the fridge.  So what can you do with oat flour?  Just about anything you can do with wheat flour, almost.

The first thing to remember with oat flour is you aren't going to have all that lovely gluten to hold your baked good together, to give them shape, chewiness, and texture.  I tried making a yeast bread with pure oat flour as I would a regular wheat loaf and ended up with rocks.  Oat flour is not as absorbent as wheat flour (at least in my opinion) so to get the same consistency as you'd expect with wheat flour, you use a whole lot more and end up with something rather inedible.  That was my first lesson.  Next I tried oat flour and yeast but treated it more as a quick bread with mixed success.  The stuff in the loaf pan rose beautifully but went flat during baking and took forever to bake.  The stuff in the muffin cups did better on both counts but wasn't all that different from a muffin.

So pure oat flour and yeast breads really aren't a good combination.  My next attempts were in recipes using baking soda, baking powder, or eggs as a leavening agent, if any.  I had pretty good success with pancakes, muffins, and yellow cupcakes, just following the recipe and substituting oat for wheat flour.  I also tried oat tortillas and a soufflé with pretty good success.  Today I tried chocolate chip cookies using a recipe I found online.  The results weren't bad, a bit crumbly but not unexpected considering the lack of gluten.  Overall, it is a nice substitute for wheat flour in non-yeast recipes, but it is less absorbent so your batters/doughs will be runnier than you might be used to but this seems to sort itself out during baking.

On the Social Aspects of Peculiar Diets

Back in the days when I was in college and preparing for the future, I remember mention of such dreadful tests as the M-CAT and V-CAT which one had to pass to get into particular professional schools, so when I heard the name of L-CAT, for a moment I wondered if I was soon to apply to law school, which would be weird as I was at my doctor's office.  The actual name is Alcat and it is a blood test for food sensitivity, or so I've heard from several people who have taken it.  I dragged my feet and hemmed and hawed and did everything to avoid the eventuality, but finally (10 years!) I took the plunge, at worst it would just be another dead end but I was sick of being sick.

As I feared, it came back with a list of foods that my gut and immune system apparently don't like.  I'd cut a lot of stuff out of my diet, thinking them the worst offenders in making me physically achy, tired, and ill.  It was quite a shock when the worst offender turned out to be wheat and I had pretty much been living on wheat based carbs for the last few years and one item on my 'do not eat ever' list came back as 'okay.'  I know other people who had had good luck with the test and felt much better after altering their diets, so I decided to do the same.  I've been off wheat for a month now and have felt great, not 100% but probably 85% better.  It isn't a perfect system, certainly or a cure, but it makes life livable again.  I was pretty skeptical at first, but for me, this test actually made a huge difference.

In my professional life I've dealt with diet related skin issues in dogs, and one 'test' is to put the hound on a hypoallergenic diet for six weeks and then slowly introduce single ingredients back into the diet, and when a certain ingredient starts causing problems, you know what the dog is sensitive to and avoid it thereafter.  I accidentally did that to myself yesterday.  I found the candy dish at work and found my favorite candy bar, which I had not had since my dietary experimentations began, forgetting that this particular piece of candy was a chocolate covered cookie, yep, wheat, oops!  And within a few hours all my symptoms came back with a vengeance.  So I guess I should publish a case study or something, but for even more corroborating evidence, I tried another experiment.  Beef was the mysterious ingredient I had avoided for so long, so for the first time in years, I ate meatballs (made with rolled oats instead of bread crumbs) and they were wonderful and, as the test predicted, didn't upset my stomach like I thought they had for so long.  Less bread, more steak I guess!

I still love wheat, even if my gut doesn't, I'm an avid bread baker and my family eats flour by the five pound bag, but I also feel good enough now that I want to cook and experiment in the kitchen, before I never had the energy.  So this has been a challenge, and a good one, it's like learning to cook all over again.  I can have oats, I'm not gluten sensitive, but to something else in wheat, so if there's a trace of gluten in something that's okay.  I put oatmeal in the blender and make oat flour and can use that in cake recipes, pancakes, muffins, and even soufflé's, but the couple attempts I've tried at yeast breads have been a disaster, but I can live without them, at least now that I've found a substitute for pizza crust (eggs and cheese!).  And it's a great excuse to make lots of special K bars (scotcharoos).

The hardest part of all this is eating outside the home.  At home I can control what I eat, but I live in a culture that is very socially food based.  You go to restaurants with your friends, people invite you over for food, there are potlucks and church suppers and pancake feed fundraisers everywhere, and even when I go somewhere professionally, after a long morning working cattle, often you get invited in for lunch.  I had a hard enough time prior to this, being afraid of most vegetables, so I would often unwittingly offend an eager hostess by not taking three helpings of cucumbers in white sauce and a large piece of pumpkin pie afterwards.  You read that right, many of these dear ladies expect you to eat three or four large servings of everything or they feel insulted!  Now I need to tell them I can't eat wheat?  Maybe if I take a good serving of beef roast they won't notice I didn't eat the bread?  Someone should write a book on the social aspects of peculiar diets!