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.***
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