HBinFive: Gluten-Free Olive Oil Bread

This challenge for HBin5 had me trying something I don't think I would ever have bothered with except for trying to stick with the group--gluten-free bread! It's hard not to have noticed the increase of gluten-free products at the store and attention being given to eating gluten-free for various health reasons. Among my friends, I only know one person who is following a gluten-free diet, so I really haven't had much experience with it. I had to do a bit of shopping to make this bread. Thankfully, last week I had a chance to stop at the bulk foods store that is out of town and picked up some soy flour. I should have looked for tapioca pearls there too, but forgot and thought I could get them in town. Turns out they only had Minute Tapioca in town and I thought maybe I could get that ground smaller with the little chopper attachment to my blender, but it really didn't seem to get any finer. I subbed plain gelatin for the xanthum gum since I didn't feel like paying $10 to get any shipped to me when I really doubted it would be used again. I used my grain mill to grind some brown rice flour. Brown rice being an ingredient I do keep on hand, but I've never tried it as flour yet.

The dough batter was very, very wet and runny when I mixed it up. I double checked the recipe to see if I'd gotten my ingredients completely out of whack somehow, but couldn't see that I had gone wrong. It would have been helpful if the book noted that this was going to be drastically different than regular dough, but there was no mention in the book. I'm not sure if this was how it was supposed to turn out or not--nobody else seems to have made mention of this in their posts. It rose beautifully in the container, but I had to go out for a while before it was completely done rising. Not sure if I should have stuck it in the fridge then, but I left it out. So it was probably out 3-4 hours instead of the recommended 2 hours. Overnight, it fell a lot in the fridge, but most doughs do seem to go down some.

When I took it out this morning to try baking it, the dough had a really strange texture. The book said it wouldn't have any stretch because of the lack of gluten, but it was just some odd looking dough. Sort of reminded me of cornmeal mush or something. I pressed it into a loaf pan, but wasn't holding out much hope for it. The dough didn't rise at all during the 90 minutes I let it sit before baking. It didn't rise at all during baking. So this bread was pretty much a complete fail. I tasted it and it's crunchy on the outside and it doesn't taste terrible. But what to do with such a skinny loaf? Guess the chickens get a treat.

I'm not sure what to do with the remaining dough. I wonder if it would turn into anything usable if I made little patties of the dough and fried it in the skillet. I can't see that it would be worth wasting pizza ingredients to try it as a pizza crust because obviously something didn't come together right with this bread. Either the tapioca or the gelatin substitutions or I totally mismeasured something. Win some, lose some. Not going to bother trying this one again, though. I do have to figure out something to do with the rest of the soy flour I bought for this. I'm not sure if there are more recipes in the book for soy flour or not.

A lot of people in the group seem to have avoided making this bread, but one of the reasons I joined this group was to get a chance to try all the recipes that I normally would skip over. So even if I don't think it will be a huge hit, I still like to try out the recipes. I figure many of them I will probably never make again, but that's okay because even trying it once has broadened our eating horizons just a little bit. And any complete failures can always be fed to the chickens who will appreciate them, so I don't ever have to throw away anything our family didn't like.

You can check out what others did with this dough by visiting the HBin5 Bread Braid hosted at Big Black Dog.