Durham's Gluten Free Network

Happy Hallloween!  Is there anything scarier than bad bread? Balance.  Skill.  Daring.  You need these to bake gluten free bread at home.  I won't claim it's "easy" because no bread baking is easy.  Baking gluten free, especially bread, can make you feel like you're doing one of those yoga postures where you're standing on your head, but it's not enough because you need to do it with style too.  But once you get the hang of it, it becomes a joy and a thrill.  Don't get caught in the low expectations trap.  Every texture problem has a solution and nobody should endure dry dense bread that crumbles, or for that matter, powdery cookies (eek!).  I believe this tiger can be tamed also. Well with that introduction, let's tackle today's baking failure!   After this disappointment, I turned to this resource and several others for advice:  https://gluten-free-bread.org/your-gluten-free-bread-baking-problems-answered ...

Wow!  Successful experiment! Well this time I forgot to add the cinnamon and raisins entirely, so this is a nice neutral bread.  It turned out light and fluffy in an almost ethereal way.  Although the color looks multigrain, the flavor and texture says croissant, the soft fluffy inside of a croissant (minus the crunch).  It looks like the air bubbles were pushed toward the center and then up to the top.  This gives an oddly reverse look to the crumb.  Usually you have large openings near the crust, but a more dense center, but this is the opposite. I cut the entire loaf in half so you could see the texture. This time I used the Dough and then Bake option.  I was going to let the dough rise longer, but the dough looked nearly totally risen at the end of the Dough cycle and I didn't want to lose that puff. I was even afraid that oven spring might bang the bread up against the lid.  But we escaped that fate. At the beginning of the second ...

Results of Experiment 1 with bread machine. I got a Cuisinart bread machine! What I made first, how it turned out, what I learned..   coming up!  We all bemoan the high price of bread.  Even someone like me, who stays ketogenic most of the time. Bread is just useful. I'm interested in all the ways people bake bread, especially today with Paleo breads, allergen friendly breads, grain free breads, etc.  Bread is soothing and a big part of our culture, so even if you have to have a strange type of bread or if you can only have a 1/4 piece, it's always important. Before I was Celiac I dabbled in bread baking.  I loved to make Rye breads especially and rosemary multigrain breads.  But those were gluten breads.  To transfer those skills to gluten free takes a lot of work.  I also don't like to follow rules without knowing why. So I don't consider this "baking" yet.  It's an experiment.  Someday I'll feel like it's baking when it b...

This health crash seems to go on and on.  It's October and I have a health issue I call the October effect, meaning my health tends to get worse at this time.  This year I'm determined not to let that happen.  There's not much room for more "worse" to happen.  I won't bore you with the complaints, but I will tell you how I keep from letting it get worse.  Since it seems to be working at the moment. I had an insight too.  We have bred many foods to be larger and sweeter than necessary, and firm enough to ship huge distances.  In the process, the content of all that good stuff (polyphenols, anthocyanins, catechins, etc... henceforth I will call them Super PACs) that are medicinal has gone down.  One of the few places we can still get full strength unmodified Super PACs is herbal tea and green tea. So I've temporarily swapped my normal coffee habit for green tea with hibiscus.  I decided not to try to avoid jury duty so I was playing ...