Really good Gluten-Free Flax Bread

Looks lovely Sonia! Huge oven spring for a gluten free bread. I always pictured GF breads as dense sandwich style bricks, but your hearth loaf completely changed the way i look at such breads.

I'am glad to know that even Celiac desease patients could enjoy hearth breads.

Nice work!

Thanks so much for posting this. i'm going to try it. I, too, never saw a gluten free with this texture and crust! Looks amazing.

I'm impressed with your GF BREAD.   I have been doing GF now for about 2 months both in a machine and in the oven, experimenting with mixes and recipes from others.   although I have used different mixtures of flours (brown rice, sorghum, millet, with tapioca, potato and cornstarches) I've not been happy with the outcome. Although my GF loaves have had relatively decent texture, I'm longing for artisanal crust, texture and flavors.  So I began to wonder how I could adapt the no knead  recipes for wheated bread to a GF bread - and then I found your post!  You've answered my question! I'm so impressed with your loaf!    The crust and crumb look fabulous!  Now I'll have to try your recipe and Dutch oven method myself.  Thanks so much!

Moya

Could you ( or other bakers)  tell me  whether I have calculated the hydration of this recipe correctly?

If I understand this correctly, one would divide the total volume of liquids by the total volume of all the flours/starches together. If this is correct I'm getting a 75% hydration. Is this correct?

Thanks for your help,

Moya

Hi Sonia

I write to thank you for sharing your GF formula, with particular thanks for the metric conversion.

My sister-in-law hasn't been diagnosed coeliac but has found she does better when she steers clear of regular bread. She has found the GF bread available in the stores here unappetising and expensive. At her home last week I adapted your formula for use in their bread maker (she's a school teacher and has 3 small children - handmade bread just isn't on the schedule). It was just a matter of figuring out the right amount of the 'yeast for breadmaker' that they had in stock.  I found all the 'flours' at a South Asian (Indian) grocery store. The loaf made to the weights you give cost $NZ4.50 for ingredients, 93 cents of that was the xanthan gum. This was about half the price of the loaves of similar weight commercially available here. The first day she was delighted, "this bread tastes wonderful!", she took sandwiches for lunch and happily made toast. I made the dry ingredients up as a premix for her.  A week has gone by so I called her tonight to find out if she was still as pleased. She told me she was so happy she'd felt like texting me everytime she had a slice. She did say that bread she'd sliced sandwich thin and frozen to store, was rather crumbly but that toast from frozen slices was great.  Your bread looks so delicious I imagine that it gets gobbled up and you don't have to think about what storage method will best extend it.  I'm thinking next time I'm over there I might experiment some more and see if perhaps preparing a water roux with maybe some of the rice flour might help. Where I live I don't have access to that range of ingredients or indeed a breadmaker. Do you (or anyone reading this ) have any suggestions for other things I could try? Perhaps I could try soaking the flaxseed meal. I want to keep the method as simple as possible so that she can just put it all in the breadmaker.

I thought I might play round with using baking soda and water rather than soda water too. This seemed to be the major change you made to the 'original' formula (which I haven't tested), what advantage did you find in using soda water?

(The first loaf I made by hand and baked in the oven just to confirm I could achieve the same result as you with the ingredients I'd purchased - I did and it was a good lesson in understanding the nature of the dough - meant I didn't get panicked as I used a torch to spy on the bread as it proofed in the bread maker, even when the first loaf collapsed in there because I used too much yeast, following the manual instructions. Went to yeast manufacturers site and used bakers % to come up with suitable quantity.)

I'm keeping an eye on your sourdough thread in the hope of hearing how that is working out for you.

With thanks again, Robyn

Thank you so much! I have started baking bread out of my home and--as my friends have requested for years--started charging them for it. But I have a few friends who are starting to request the gluten free stuff, and I wanted to make something different than the bricks offered in the freezer section here, too. This looks like it's exactly what I'm looking for.

Just one question: what is surgham flour? I work at a fairly well stocked health food store; we have lots of GF flours, but I haven't seen this one. If  I can't find it here, are there substitutions I can make?

Cheers!