Bread Recipes

[avery'smommy82]

I'm interested in making my own bread. We buy Udi's now and we really like it but I'm thinking I could try my have at it. Any good ( easy) recipes out there? Preferably vegan or without eggs.

[lpellegr]

There must be hundreds of recipes out there, and dozens of mixes. The mixes are probably the way to start, especially if you can find them in bulk or on sale. Bread recipes usually call for multiple kinds of flour and things like xanthan gum, gelatin, etc. If you don't want to invest in all of those items and the space they will take in your house, go with the mixes - try a few until you find one you like. If you really like to bake, then look into gluten-free bread cookbooks - there are plenty out there, more all the time. I started with Bette Hagman's books, and like a lot of her recipes, but gluten-free bread baking is always iffy - you may need to repeat recipes several times and monkey with times and temperatures and ingredients until they come out right in your oven in your house. Don't be afraid to fail - you can always make your mistakes into crumbs or croutons and try again. We will be here with advice!

[Takala]

If you are trying to avoid eggs, look for gluten free recipes that contain buckwheat flour, amaranth flour, and almond flour or meal, which are all "stickier" than rice flour based recipes. They work even better, if you can pre soak them in some liquids from the recipe. A little amaranth in a recipe is not only higher protein, but strangely mold retardant when the bread is stored in the refrigerator. Tapioca also adds some gummy qualities. You can take and soak ground flax seed meal in hot water to make flax gel as an egg substitute, or soak chia seed in room temperature cool water to make "chia gel," besides using the commercial egg substitutes such as from Ener- G, which is a combination of potato starch and a gluten free baking powder.

Once you have decided what sort of flours and egg substitute you'd like to use, you can then use a baking soda and pure apple cider vinegar leavening to make the recipe rise. Not too much vinegar, or it tends to de- gel that flax or chia mixture you are also using. A lot of baking soda makes it taste a bit salty, so you may have to adjust the salt content. You may also want to use a smaller loaf pan than is normal for these gluten free recipes, they bake up a LOT better this way.

A flour mixture that works well eggless is 1/3 buckwheat, 1/3 potato starch, and 1/3 garbanzo bean flour, or 1/4 each buckwheat, amaranth, potato starch, and garbanzo flour. If you don't like bean flours, you can substitute.

If you are using eggs and can use cheese or yogurt, the Chebe mixes (tapioca) are the easiest to make little rolls with. Small amounts of other flours and an extra egg or yogurt can be added to the Chebe mixtures.

The number one rule is to test before pulling from the oven, by sticking a clean knife into the middle and seeing if the knife comes out clean, if not, put it back in to bake some more. The second rule is, that there is no hard and fast rule about recipes, because every gluten free flour is different and will suck up different amounts of moisture. These doughs tend to be wetter, and they therefore bake differently. If you want to read some comedy routines, see the comments under any gluten free recipe for those people trying coconut flour for the first time. I remember once a blogger tried adapting another (famous) blogger's bread recipe, but did not successfully convert the amounts of fluid ingredients to the dry ones, and it seemed nobody caught this as they kept tinkering with it and tinkering with it and it never worked. It was too wet as it went into the oven. I had read Shauna Ahern's Gluten Free Girl and the Chef blog where she talks about proportions of starches to proteins and liquid and dry, and caught it. And this is a good place to go check out the archives.

The best way to play around with recipes and flour mixtures is to do small ones in the microwave at first, like a bun-in-a-cup. Microwave baking also is very fast. This way, you don't blow $5 worth of ingredients on making a bigger loaf of gluten free bread that it turns out you don't like anyway.

some recipes: