I finally got around to getting a breadmaker this week, and
I can honestly say, folks, my life is about to change. Seriously! I
made bread! It was easy, it was not frustrating, it was
SUCCESSFUL!
I ended up buying the Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme at CA
Paradis here in Ottawa. I did a bit of research, and
although there are a few breadmakers out there that will
deal with gluten-free (gf) flours, this one was the one recommended
by most gf people, mainly because of the flexibility in creating
your own cycles (you can set the times for mixing, kneading,
rising, baking, etc). Zojirushi has some advice on their website,
but I would just do a google search (or email me!) if you are
looking for tips on figuring it out. I've only made one loaf so far
but it was very easy, and worked out well, even after I thought I
had screwed it up. You see, I read all the tips and recommendations
for the manual settings when the loaf was already in the
machine being made, ie AFTER it was too late for this loaf. I read
the manual that came with the maker, and it said to put it through
on a regular basic wheat bread setting. This setting has three
separate risings. As any of you gluten-free bakers know, the flours
we use don't like to be risen to much - they just don't have the
capabilities of a wheat flour. Since yeast uses both sugar and
gluten to get a rise out of itself, it's feeling a little deprived
in a gluten-free environment. So it chows down just on the sugars
instead. I wasn't sure the dough would last through all three
risings and still leave anything higher than unleavened bread by
the end, but the loaf still ended up being higher and fluffier than
anything I had made by hand and in the regular oven!
Most of time in the past, I've never been able to eat my bread
"raw", and therefore always toast it first. Mainly because the
loaves are so moist and feel like they are still a bit
undercooked to me. Weirdly enough, they are also really crumbly.
Don't ask me how these two characteristics exist together, they
just do. The loaves seemed undercooked even
after being in the oven for twice the normal time - I was
finding things would take forever to bake. I
wondered if it was my oven, or the ingredients, or the
combination of ingredients, I couldn't figure it out. One
of the things I learned at the gluten-free Christmas baking
workshop last week, run by the super lovely Alea of My Real Food
Life, was that palm oil (which is in many dairy-free
margarines) has a higher heating point than butter, and therefore
makes things baked with it take longer than normal. Finally! Some
answers!!
But this lovely and amazing loaf, I could eat without
toasting and it tasted great! I bought a gluten/dairy free mix
from Bob's
Red Mill - the Whole Grain mix. I actually bought it at Produce Depot just because I was there
anyway. They actually have a ton of gluten/dairy free and
other allergen-free stuff now (at least the one on Carling at
Maitland does). I do have all sorts of flours in my cupboards
that I'll be using, but I just picked up the mix thinking it would
be easy (it was). With gf baking, you often have to mix a lot of
different flours in order to give a semblance of texture. Otherwise
you basically end up with everything looking and tasting like a
rice cracker. Which, I suppose, is fine if a rice cracker is what
you are after, but come on people, a girl's gotta have options.
Even with this success, I still had a bit of transitional angst
come out of this experience. I used to be a really good wheat bread
baker - I made bread by hand, kneading it, shaping it, baking
it. It was fabulous if I do say so myself. I loved the process of
kneading the dough in my hands, the smell of the dough rising as it
sat in a warm place, filling the house with yeasty-bakey goodness.
Made me feel domestic and as though I was part of an ancient
breadmaking ritual. But now, things are totally different. You
can't really knead gf doughs - they are a bit more like cake batter
than elastic dough. You can't whip up a loaf in no time, since you
have mix up your rice and potato and arrowroot and buckwheat and
garbanzo flours. And, when you are having baking failure after
failure, you tend to start to hate baking. So now I'm using a
breadmaker - I always laughed at people using breadmakers - that's
not REAL baking, that's like using a microwave oven to cook a
turkey! But, that breadmaker gave me an awesome loaf of bread! So,
maybe I no longer feel part of some wheat-friendly ancient ritual.
I'll have to come up with a new overarching paradigm to fit into.
Maybe this one will have Demeter and Ceres working in tandem with "Zoji", the
Japanese animé videogame boy who goes on an adventure and finds the
key to feeding the hungry gluten-intolerant people of the
world - it just happens to be in the shape of a breadmaker.