When it became clear to me I had to be gluten free, one of the foods I missed most was bread. Yes, you can buy bread at the grocery store but have you really tried them? In my opinion, they are tasteless and the texture is offputting.
So, I started a quest to find some kind of reasonable option that I could make myself. My quest started poorly. I tried to take recipies which used wheat flour and translate them into GF. I figured the 1 to 1 or cup for cup flours on the market were the right answer to this transition. Boy was I wrong!!! First thing I learned, 1 to 1 flours are not! I learned very quickly you can’t use grandma’s cake recipe and use 1 to 1 flour and have anything useful.
Based on this failure, I started searching for information online. I stumbled on a cook book from America’s Test Kitchen hereafter, ATK, (https://www.americastestkitchen.com) which was strictly gluten free, since I knew the show and trust their information so I purchased a copy.
I was pleasently surprised to find they had not only made many favorite recipies into GF format, they also explained why and how they came up with the ingredients they used. I sat down and read the introduction and explainations and then went to buy the ingredients to make their flour mix. (You will find that there are many blogs and web pages in which people offer their specific flour mixes. Some of these work in a universal fashion, many do not in my experience.)
I like the mix from ATK as it is, in my opinion, truly budget friendly and easy to use. I use the recipe for white bread (as in not a “wheat” type bread) but because I do prefer a “wheat” type bread, I add 1/2 cup of ground flax seeds to it. This makes the taste and texture more like wheat bread. I can get 3 loaves from my breadmaker on one batch of flour.
Which leads me to the next adventure I undertook in my quest to find reasonable bread.
While I love the recipe from ATK, it is time consuming. All told, it takes about 3 hours to get a loaf of bread. I started looking for a recipe for a bread maker since mine had been sitting on the shelf for ages. I landed on a site called Mamaknowsglutenfree (https://www.mamaknowsglutenfree.com). I made the bread exactly as the recipe exactly as written once and decided two very important things to me. First, the recipe calls for Pillsbury Gluten Free flour, which I can’t get locally and it $6 to $7 per bag.
This recipe uses almost a whole bag so you will only get one loaf from a bag. This to me wasn’t budget friendly as the bread in the stores is in this price range.
I tried this recipe with the flour mix from ATK, it worked perfectly! Second, I learned that I can use psyllium husks (read the reasoning in the ATK cookbook) instead of xantham gum. To me, this is a better solution as it adds some nutritional value in the form of fiber and to me, makes the texture much nicer. I omit the xantham gum and instead use 3 TBSP of psyllium husks. I also add 1/2 cup groud flax seeds for the “wheat” type bread. It is fabulous! And now, I can make a loaf of bread in about an hour which is far more reasonable.
You might have to fuss with settings on your bread maker to get the cooking time correct but in my opinion, well worth it to have a great way to make bread in your bread machine. I have a bread slicer and an electric knife for slicing the loaf once cooled and stored in the freezer right away after slicing. I purchased a freezer bag to store it in which has worked very nicely.