My First Gluten Free Bread

Having finally collected all the ingredients to try making gluten-free baked goods, I made my first attempt this evening.

I used the Bob's Red Mill GF bread mix, because I wanted to get some sort of idea what dealing with GF dough would be like before I went mixing some of my own. It's quite different from regular wheat dough. For one thing, it's a lot wetter. You can't handle it in a ball like regular dough, it's more like a very stiff batter. You mix it with a regular beater, not a dough hook. When you put it into the pan it's stiff enough that it won't level out, but you can smooth it out with a spatula.

The directions said to bake it for 60-65 minutes, but when I smelled it burning at 45 minutes I took it out. A full hour seemed like way too long to bake a loaf of bread at 375 degrees, but what do I know about gluten free bread? For all I know it takes longer to bake than wheat bread. So I just followed directions.

There are loads of different flour substitution formulas for GF baked goods. The Bob's Red Mill mix was heavy on the bean flours, including garbanzo and fava beans, and this gave the bread a bit of an off taste. In addition the bread was kind of rubbery. It was a tad chewy, and you could flop a slice around as if it were made of rubber. Still, though, it was definitely bread of some sort, and it had a bread texture and everything, and it pretty much tasted like bread.