I've been dabbling in gluten free again for a friend-trying some different recipes. GF baking has been around a long time and I thought I would turn to some recipes that have a long history. That brings me to rice based Shokupan. I searched on TFL but any of the shokupan references/posts I find are for either wheat- or rye-based milk breads. I found the following recipe and wonder if TFL COllective can help me with this project. I haven't tried it,yet. I was hoping to gather some wisdom or practical insight. This recipe came from TikTok. Someone showed it to me and I jotted it down so, sorry, no link.
BLENDER GF RICE BREAD (with random notes)
100G cooked short grain rice (any leftover rice will do-starchier the better)
150ml hot water
Put both in blender and blend until a very starchy,smooth slurry.
In a large bowl, add above and mix in the rest of the ingredients:
150 ml cold water
4 g salt
25g sugar
5 g instant yeast
10g oil
250g fine rice flour.
(In talking to people and researching recipes, a small amount of baking powder is often used)
Mix thoroughly and place in well-greased loaf pan.
Rise til almost double-spray top with water.
Put in a cold oven set at 375F?? ( I didn't write down temp)
Cool in pan 20 min before removing.
Helps if outside crust is baked to crisp to help support bread and prevent from sinking.
Thoughts? Experiences? Similar recipes?
Thanks!
Getting used to the new site. Wow! 20 yrs!!!!!! I've been here for a lot of them and it has always been a pleasure.
Gotta say, I'm really intrigued by this. I was struggling to figure out why rice flour + yeast (or leavening in general) sounded familiar to me, and I think it's because it sounds a lot like how you make fa gao but baked instead of steamed.
It'd probably produce something bread-like but I'd be really interested to hear if the texture is actually shokupan-like.
I just read a post on this - rice-based sandwich loaves - somewhere but didn't bookmark it. As I remember, it said that using rice flour wasn't enough - you need to add something that will gel more, and I think that something ended up being psillium, and possibly some xanthan gum too. The example loaf looked pretty decent, though nothing beats having one in your own hands.
After reading that, I would be thinking about sticky rice rather than white rice, and I'm pretty sure I've seen sticky rice flour in the local international market..
TomP
I am intrigued with this recipe because it does not have psyllium and/or xanthan gum and yet seems to produce a loaf.
This recipe is an updated version from much older recipes from before xanthan and psyllium and gluten free was ever conceived. The cooked,short grain or sticky rice that is blended in the hot water creates a gel for providing structure but I have my doubts it is as easy as the tiktok person made it seem. I usually use both xanthan gum and psyllium but not everyone can eat them.
I would love to hear hands-on experience from anyone that has made this type of loaf before I dive in.
Interesting that it sounds like steamed buns. I will compare.
I can't recall ever making it but I got some left over cooked rice in the fridge from yesterday and heck, why not?
I'll have to check for rice flour though. What size loaf pan do you think we should use?
Mini
I know, I know, you want people who have actually tried it. Still, I can't resist linking this thread. It fills in some details, like pan size, temperature, rice type, and the loaves in the videos look like "real bread".
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/67887/100-rice-bread-soft-spongy-gluten-free
After reading the above link and comparing recipes and techniques, decided I'd work with the above recipe and my left over cooked jasmine rice. Used up all my rice flour with perhaps a tablespoon left over. I did add a little more water a spoon at a time nearing 150ml and going over about 30ml until I got the ribbon effect mentioned in the video on the older post. Very handy that. (we shall see) The blender treatment started out very fluid but I would stop for a few minutes and then blend again, each time getting thicker and smoother.
I poured into my old tarnished steel skinny bread tin and decided to go with the baking parchment liner. tin measures 25cm x 10cm and 7cm deep. Filled the lower good third and waiting for the rise. At first seeing a few bubbles pop on the surface sort of scared my hopes for a rise but it is rising with rounded shoulders under plastic wrap. Trick is now not to overproof.
I plan to foil tent it without spraying with water as both methods pretty much do the same deed, one or the other. Won"t be long now and then I'll be coming back and figuring out how to post a pic. Good or bad. Cold oven eh? plan: 150C for 40 min and 200C for 20 min. I hope the jasmine rice gives a nice fragrance. It just fits into my mini oven.
Edit: Oh no, that last cm of rise went way too fast and stuck to my plastic wrap...forgot to oil it and it tore. went clear up to the edge of the pan. and doing some kind of bubbling and churning. hmmmm.
Mini-o-my back baking again. Twenty years TFL! Congratulations Whole Family Floyd!
later: Fail! i removed the foil after 40 min and it had fallen during the first part of baking. (never to return?) Guess I should have knocked it down and let it rise again before baking. Will be better the next time. it's still in the oven. still is one cm below the rim which isn't too bad. crumb will tell. Smells like bread.
I think the "ribbon test" should be talked about a lot more in GF baking. It is probably a great predictor of the structural capability of a dough, And marking the rise-to-double line with a toothpick is such simple genius. Another trick I will employ in all my baking.
I was excited to see your response, MiniOven!! TFL has been a wonderful experience. The world needs a good community example more than ever.
Today I will try this loaf. I have 100g cooked sticky rice and I will probably use the baking instructions from the video. I hope you figure out the picture posting-I'm still behind on that but this bake will be a good initiation.
Agree! So easy to do too! My cooked rice was jasmine scented long rice. Sticky rice might be a surprise. Wonder what will happen. i"m not getting any more rise out my loaf (still in the oven) and it's looking a bit sway backed like an old mare. Still smells good. it will get recycled into dumplings or something. Starting to brown.10 min left on the clock. Dog is hanging out in the kitchen so it probably tastes good.
Lets see. the batter was in the bread pan and covered at 2 o'clock and it"s almost an hour in the oven at 4 o'clock. one hour rising was too long, set a timer! for a 45 min rise?
I can honestly say my flop isn't as flat and compressed as I thought it would be. Texture looks more like a deep sea sponge with lots of bubbles and while it is still warm leaves a gummy knife (to be expected cutting a hot loaf of bread.) The taste is.... well... very new to me but I nibbled down a first and a second little warm sticky slice that seemed to set as it cooled in my hand. Taste....the jasmine rice in it tastes orchid or mild flowers, crispy and tasty dark golden brown outside edges (I can see the recipe as a thinner batter and spooned out like cookies baked on a sheet for crackers.) I don"t know what to think of the flavour. It's new, a little sweet (that"s the sugar) very mild (that's the rice) with a subtle aftertaste at the back of the throat. I think it would easily take on any flavour combined with it. Crumb is white and moist.
I'll do the first bake as written but may cut down the sugar. I might add a little nutritional yeast to my 2nd bake. I find the nutritional yeast gives a slight "bread" flavor that is usually well received by GF folks. The sticky rice I have is a pretty neutral flavor compared to the corn-like flavor of basmati I usually make. Hmm...basmati does not have as much starch as sticky rice but I wonder if a mix would impart a different flavor. So many experiments that could be done!
Kind of like an angel cake texture?? More to come.
I fell down a youtube hole last night and saw similar recipes for a rice flour shokupan, but using only rice flour and no cooked paste - thought I'd try it out since they were supposed to only take 30 min! I followed this video.
But I got this lovely crater and some oven cleaning to do hahaha. I think it was over proofed by probably 10-15 minutes - felt like it started really slow but that last bit of rise was very speedy! And I had to add a fair bit of extra water to get the right flow, probably because my rice flour was old.
The innards actually have a bread-ish texture to them. The taste is... rice-y? And a little yeasty which makes it taste more like bread.
I also came across this blender bread last night and have some rice soaking to try it out! Will report back later today after I make it (and the oven is cleaned lol).
Are not very forgiving at all when it comes to over proofing. The window for a perfect proof is short and if you go over it'll collapse as fast as you can say "Shokupan". Better to err on the side of caution. I haven't studied the recipe but there's no need for two rises. That's good for gluten breads. With some knowledge about gluten free breads (even with no knowledge of shokupan) i'd recommend one rise, err on the side of caution, and bake.
EDIT: Another way, if it is a batter bread and drawing from experience with buckwheat batter bread, is to allow the batter to become very bubbly then gently pour it into a prepared loaf pan and bake straight away.
If the gluten free bread has structure from an added binder then a shape, one rise and bake. If it is a batter bread then allow the mixture to become very bubbly, pour carefully into the loaf pan and bake.
"wait then pour then bake"
Thanks Abe, from what I witnessed that would work too. When I removed the plastic wrap from my over risen loaf the plastic wrap formed a tube around a good bit of dough sticking to it. I wanted to save that dough. I held it up with one hand and squeezed the dough out with the other and it landed right down the middle and length of the loaf and sunk deep into it. I thought that my finished loaf would show a dense section down the middle of the loaf but it didn't. However it did deflate the entire loaf dropping it 1cm down below the pan edge. The bubbly batter reminded me of tapioca pudding only the "pearls" were air bubbles. I don"t think one should wait until the batter is that bubbly. That 1 cm band of dough stuck to the parchment liner made for very crispy collar of crunchies to munch on while waiting for the short loaf to cool. Trimmed it off with a big scissors. :)
My pleasure mini.
I've had gluten free breads come out of the oven looking perfect then as they cooled they sank. I'll have to look at the recipe and video to see the consistency of the dough but if blended it sounds like a batter. With the naturally fermented buckwheat bread it is soaked, blended, allowed to ferment then portioned out into the loaf pan and baked straight away in a preheated oven. If a gluten free bread has something like psyllium husks or some other binder then it gets mixed, portioned out into a loaf pan, allowed to rise (a bit like a rye) then baked. From what you describe it sounds very delicate and won't be able to support a big rise. This actually sounds like an experiment i'd enjoy.
https://youtu.be/8IQuDDOLoyI?si=vGlxkyg-5AOd-chy
The video link has many similarities to my bread bake. The parchment over the risen bread and a simple alu-foil wrap around the whole loaf would have made it easier for me. Trying to shape a tent from foil was clumsy on my part. I see there was also a problem with cling wrap sticking to dough. My baked top crust looked identical. My batter was not as thin, mine - just a tad less water. I also ended up cutting the loaf upside down as the top crust needed more pressure to cut through. Was laughing at myself at this point in the video. My loaf was flatter and not so tall due to over-proofing but I think I have the right pan size volume. the crumb in the video looks finer than mine.
I am trying the original recipe using leftover short grain rice. Made the pseudo-tang zhou by blending the cooked short grain (VERY sticky) rice with hot water and then added the other ingredients (except I forgot the oil). I was too caught up in trying to measure out all the extra water needed to get a bater instead of crumbles. My rice flour is also old and apparently very thirsty. I needed almost double the amount of water than the recipe called for. As a result, I have 2 pans of dough-1 regular loaf size and 1 small. They are rising now-I better keep an eye on them according to you. Timer set. And I think I will put a drip catcher under the pans. :)
My recipe was way off for the amount of water. I need to look at a different recipe. I also need to buy some fresh rice flour. I have brown rice flour-I might give that a go. I only did 2/3 of the sugar and I am surprised to say it needed the full amount. Same with the salt level. I always cut the salt amount as I am pretty much low salt so most recipes are too high on salt for my palate. However, it seems rice is really flavorless and needs all the help it can get. I added nutritional yeast to one of the loaves and it tastes better than the plain.
Besides falling, I believe the baking is tricky ,too. This is a really wet loaf and it really needs to lose a lot of moisture. Next time I'm not tenting it. I will spritz the surface with water and put it into a preheated 375F oven and treat it like a cross between a WW and high rye. It will have to sit for a while after it is cooled before I cut it.
Abe- this very much reminds me of the Buckwheat experiments. Glad to get your expertise. I think this bread would benefit from psyllium/gums but I am trying to achieve a reasonable bread without them.
Tomorrow is another day. Let me know what happens with everyone who is experimenting.
How old was the cooked rice? Mine was at least 24 hours and chilled between. I know that fried rice won"t behave if the cooked rice is too fresh or warm, the starches have to cool and set first.
I cut my rice loaf today and no gummy residue on the knife. Tastes more like bread although still very mild. I decided to make toast and one can get by with only a tiny amount of jam. Still a heavy wet loaf so I cut it up into cubes and oven toasted them until they were golden brown, dry and very (teeth breaking) crunchy. Taste reminds me now of unsweetened rice crispies. Put them in a jar and plan on sinking them in soup.
Or (another experiment) recycle them to flavour a rice bread as crumbs or flour. i will soak a few brickles in boiling water and see if they soften. If they do, blenderize 'em with the hot water for the rice paste?
Also need to get fresh rice flour. That might make all the difference although I kind of like a challenge and flopping around. That last bag was from 2014. (Surprise! Long shelf life?) (A half life of TFL!)
Mini
So I did make that blender rice bread that I linked in my earlier post. I also watched the buckwheat video and I think the process is super similar between the two!
So you can see it looks... less like a crater, at the very least, lol. Apologies for the sideways photos, I guess it's because I'm uploading vertical pictures and typing from my phone.
I made some very minor mods to the recipe, which I will type up in a reply to this when I get back to my computer haha.
Overall the texture is actually not bad. I have definitely had worse gluten-free breads, and I'm very thankful that I actually don't need to cut gluten out of my life haha. It's spongy but has bounce that I associate with a shokupan (or I guess regular bread in general, thanks to the gluten). I took a short video of the bounce and will try to upload that later as well.
The taste is very mild, as we've all commented on. It does have the bread-y taste from the yeast but to me, it just tastes like sweet and bland rice, but in... weird bread form. Not sure how to describe it. It's very moist, almost to the point of being gummy, but not quite.
I could definitely see this as a good gluten-free substitute for shokupan though! It's simple, the ingredients are common, and the bread could potentially even fool someone as containing gluten, if they were not experienced in the ways of bread haha.
And since I do still have slices of my sandwich loaf, here's a comparison of the two:
So you can see the differences for yourself.
Recipe from ChefSteps (very minor changes, and I cut the recipe in half for a mini loaf since I remembered that I actually own a mini loaf pan):
Soak this in water overnight. They say any rice or grain could be used. I picked a short grain Japonica that I have on hand for regular eating, and the variety is Nanatsuboshi (which means seven stars), grown in Hokkaido.
At some point, line your pan with parchment paper. I'm not sure if this is necessary if you have a non-stick pan or you grease it, but I didn't want to have to scrape out a failed bread and mostly put it in for ease of cleaning.
After the overnight soak, drain and reserve water (one of my changes). Put the rice into a blender with:
Blend until it is smooth. I checked the temperature of the batter and it was ~81F.
Add in:
Give it a short blend to distribute the yeast.
Pour batter into the prepared pan and let rise, covered with plastic wrap so you can monitor the progress easily. They say 15-30 min, up to 45 min, until it reaches below the top of the pan. My pan is longer and wider and taller than theirs, so I let it rise until it looked bubbly, which... is inexact, but y'know. It looked like a bread dough that was fully proofed, and did take about 30 minutes.
While batter is rising, preheat oven to 365F.
They say to bake for 35-40 min in a conventional oven, and 30-35 min in a convection. What I did was 30 min in the oven on a rack places in a baking sheet full of water, then 5 min in my toaster oven to brown the top (removing the loaf pan was easier than removing a tray full of hot water lol), because it was very pale. And then another 5 min on 325F in the toaster oven after I removed the bread from the pan and parchment, to brown the sides and bottom (covering the top with foil), since I didn't realize how pale and soft they actually were. So there's some refinement that could be done here, haha.
I did not try to slice it while it was warm, because it was pretty late when it came out of the oven, but I imagine it would be super gummy. They also recommend letting it fully cool. I left it out, uncovered, in my dry Canadian condo, and the bread is still very moist.
I,also, tried the Blender Bread from Chef Steps but my outcome was much different. I soaked 350 G Mahatma brand long grain rice (he did say any rice could be used) overnight. I discarded the water (actually it is going into my shower for use as a hair rinse). I stuck to the recipe except I added 2 tbsp nutritional yeast for flavor. The batter came together nicely, I filled the pan to a little over half full, it rose to less than double in about 25 minutes and was placed in a preheated oven with a wet towel in the oven in a casserole dish to provide steam. After 10 minutes it looked great but at the 15 minute mark it collapsed. I continued baking for another 15 minutes and took it out. So disappointing.
So what will I do different next time.
If these 2 attempts fail, I will try to add some psyllium. It is the least problematic of the GF baking structural ingredients for most people.
Heere is a picture of my sorry loaf:
Is it like a pancake batter?
Yes- it is a thick,pourable batter consistency.
I used a long grain rice that the original recipe author claimed was entirely do-able. After dissecting this loaf, I believe that even though the rice was soaked for 18 hrs, it still did not have enough starchy gel to support the loaf. Stellar used the same recipe but a stickier rice and was successful. So, my next strategy is to try a stickier rice and see if I can be successful.
I am trying to develop a rice-based recipe that is easy for a casual baker to make with simple, commonly available ingredients and, hopefully, without gums. I was attracted to this recipe because of its simplicity. Not so simple, I'm finding.
Oh no! That's a huge difference and really unfortunate. I used a half recipe since I didn't want to suffer another cratered failure. I didn't monitor my bread as it was in the oven, because I didn't want to watch it fall in real-time lol, but maybe I should have, for more details for the experiment.
The Chef Steps recipe uses jasmine rice, which doesn't have much "stick" to it, so I'm not sure if the rice type was the problem. I was 50/50 on using jasmine or the short grain I ended up with - ended up picking the one I had for dinner, to save the effort on washing rice haha. I don't think I had too many deviations from the base recipe before baking (save the water, add the yeast later). Actually I'm not sure if there was any comment on washing the rice, since I just wash all rice out of habit.
I wonder if your batter may have been over proofed, if you added the yeast and blended it with everything? I made sure to add the yeast later since I wasn't sure how hot my blender would make the batter.
My pan is 7" x 3" x 3" and the batter only came up maybe 1/3 of the way. I put it into the oven at about 2/3 full after ~30 min, but hard to really say since I had a black pan and lots of parchment regardless. I've set the thermostat in the condo to be ~22C, if that's another data point that would be helpful. Since the recipe says 15-30 min if you get up to the "correct" temperature with blending, maybe 25 min is too long? There's a lot more heat that would stay in a larger mass too.
Fermenting it first, until it is well risen and bubbly, then pour it into a prepared loaf pan and bake in a pre-heated oven straight away.
This recipe has a really big amount of yeast, in my opinion. The yeast population must have just taken off, sitting for 30 minutes making bubbles in a very liquid batter and then it hits the oven heat and the bubbles must have just expanded quickly. The rapid expansion of the bubbles must have outrun the heat-setting of the crumb and the bubbles merge and then collapse. Abe's idea of pouring the fermented batter into a pan might actually break the bigger bubbles and since it is immediately put into the oven, the smaller bubbles are only able to expand a little bit before setting in place, thus producing a finer crumb that is easier for the gel to support. It must be do-able as you were able to achieve a great texture. As simple as this recipe and concept is, it is definitely challenging.
With batter breads if done this way. If the bread has a binder then it is the opposite. You mix the dough, put it into the loaf pan for one rise and then bake (careful to not let it rise too much). For a batter bread allow it to become bubbly (like a levain) then portion it out into a loaf pan and bake straight away. It'll bake like a cake. Also, make sure it is fully baked before removing from the oven.
For baking a batter bread which is very hydrated i'd recommend 350F for 50 minutes to 90 minutes. Depending on the oven sometimes it can be longer.
See the video I linked in reply to MiniOven above. Buckwheat bread is very similar when done this way. If you don't wish to go down the natural ferment route then soak the groats, blend and then add yeast or a little starter. Before portioning it out into the loaf pan you can even add some seeds. Mixing it gently in will be fine. It'll have more than enough bubbles to rise enough. Buckwheat groats create a gel when soaked so it works really well this way.
I've done buckwheat and loved the community bake-learned a lot. I really want to try and master this rice bread. Rice is a cheap and a very accessible ingredient here. Buckwheat is hard to source locally and very expensive by comparison.
works very well with buckwheat but i'm not sure it'll suit everything. However the method seems to be similar albeit with added yeast. It makes sense to me, other than the source of fermentation, that everything else would work very much the same way. After it has been soaked and blended add the yeast and proceed as in the video when it is well risen.
I look forward to the results.