I've been thrashing my way through to a bread for my wife Carol,. She suffers from a mess of intolerances, IBS and an autoimmune neuropathy that necessitates a/the Mediterranean Diet. Said MD does not have a canonical definition, but means different things to different people. Carol's requirements:
- no gluten, no lactose
- whole grains
- EV olive oil
- acid-reflux diet restrictions
- low/no/fat
- egg white only, no yolk
- no starch
- restricting things that cause gas or nausea (possible with xanthan gum)
As you might imagine, this eliminates virtually anything resembling normal wheat-based bread right from the start. I've been at it with my Zojirushi Virtuoso for a year or so now. I started out with a Zoji GF brown rice bread Rx, modified to restrict the ingredient no-nos or at least limit them and fought my way through months of results that cratered and had considerable potato starch. Eventually, I tried adding potato flakes at a suggestion here and managed to achieve a loaf that didn't crater but still had too much starch and my wife didn't like much. <sigh>
So I flogged the net again (all the nifty picture-book GF breads are mostly starches) and finally found this one to adapt that uses equal parts of millet, TEFF. brown rice and sorghum flour, no starch at all, my current adapted Rx here. At this point I have a 3.5" high loaf that looks like this... It's still a work in progress.
I would wish a higher rise, a more plastic texture (note from the picture that the loaf cracks rather than splits as a wheat bread) and a less gummy mouth feel (sigh, how do you replace gluten with gum and not have it taste gummy?). Any suggestions?
And a specific question about GF bread made in a bread machine concerning the dough consistency. I learned the hard way that a dough with the consistency of the proud elastic consistency of a wheat bread...but made with GF ingredients....would create bullet-proof flat bread. GF dough needs to be more liquid...note I do NOT use the word hydration because that brings in the matter of the flour assimilating the liquid. Question: what consistency should it be at at the end of the knead circle?
(More wisdom: GF has no gluten to develop and only rise once...if you do another knead it will not rise again, you will have flatbread).
While wheat bread in a bread machine will develop and cohere into an elastic wad of dough, GF dough never does: the knead cycle is really just a mix cycle. The GF dough pools at the bottom of the bread machine like this, thin consistency on the left, thicker consistency on the right
Question: How does the consistency, wetness, of GF dough affects rise and final loaf height? Does a thinner wetter dough make it easier for the yeast to lift the dough? Or does a thicker dough provide more strength, more flour component to structurally support the risen bread? Or is there a sweet spot in the middle?
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I took a few minutes to look at some of the earlier posts in your journey to a suitable bread for your wife. The constraints that you have to work within are a real challenge.
When you were attempting to address a cratering issue, you mentioned that you had abandoned psyllium husk and were focusing on gums as the primary means of providing structure in the bread. May I ask why? From my limited gluten-free baking experience, I have found psyllium husk in lieu of gums to be very helpful in addressing a lot of the complaints about gf breads; particularly regarding crumbly texture and rapid staling. Have you conducted any further attempts using psyllium husk instead of gums?
I note that your are working with a bread machine and have managed to miss your reasons for that choice. Would you be willing/able to mix the dough/batter by other means and bake it in an oven, instead? That would allow you some additional latitude while eliminating the bread machine idiosyncracies.
Best of luck with your continued efforts.
Paul
I will give that a try in one of my followons. My wife beats me about the head and shoulders about my attempts to produce something more like bread than some GF bread-surrogate extrusion. "The last one was just fine, why do you have to keep changing it" I persist.
A less successful efforts:
It's fine, I don't mind the cratering.
This was my successful, looks like bread, with potato starch and potato flakes that she said tasted bad (the dough, not surprisingly, looked like.....mashed potatoes)
My wrists and thumbs are shot, bone on bone at 78. And being a Zojirushi Virtuoso, I can program it fairly well outside of the baking temperature which is non-adjustable/
When I try to access your current Rx I get this message in my browser console.
This is sigh inducing. the HTTPS vs HTTP and SSL encryption thing is overblown/hyped IMHO (with a lifetime career in computers). Encryption is need if you exchanging finance related stuff. It's not for exchanging recipes and pictures of kitty-kats, none of which are involved. I suppose you might worry that some SOB has embedded something nasty in a Word doc, but that's stretch. The thing is that you (the owner and the one who pays for its costs) have to pay a not-insiginificant Price extra for the encryption...when it isn't needed for family memories, recipes, the Bugattis my father had when I wuz a teenager or my imagery....and I'm living on a Social Security shoestring. It's as if you had to buy a Brinks truck that you only needed whendriving to the mall to do shopping. Since you're not shopping at my website, you don't need the Brinks truck.
According to your errmsg, there's nothing insecure with my website,rather the problem is with your route to it...which I have no control over
would buckwheat meet your wife's dietary requirements? There were a couple of 100% buckwheat recipes posted on this site that sounded extremely good -- for instance, https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/73198/almost-abes-100-buckwheat (i believe it uses whole eggs, but you could probably get away with meringue only)
Rob
But thanks....everyone has their favorites.