Gluten free sourdough

I used to bake sourdough bread all the time. I had a good homemade starter, a baking stone, and over a few years I really had the technique down. What I'd make for every day was a white couche/bloomer loaf, but I also made ciabatta, baguette, pizza, and English muffins. When I went low carb and then gluten free, of course all that had to stop; and while I used to enjoy baking at the time, I must admit I didn't really miss it. It was good to have the extra time.

I've found I don't miss eating bread, either, quite apart from the gluten and carby concerns. However, I have occasionally and idly wondered whether it would be possible to make a decent gluten-free sourdough, and so for the sake of experimentation, and for the sake of my partner who occasionally wants a slice of gluten-free bread, I decided to give it a go.

I looked at pre-blended gluten free bread flours, but these seem to include potato and tapioca flours as well as rice and xanthan gum. Now, these things may be fine, and they may be there for good reason - to improve the crumb texture, etc. However, I do have slight concerns with potatoes, and I don't know enough about tapioca (derived from cassava) to be sure whether I want to eat it. Also I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for the first attempt. So I went for a plain rice flour, and xanthan gum, which supposedly replaces some of the stretch and spring of gluten.

The next step was to prepare the starter. Sourdough bread is yeast-leavened, but it doesn't use regular cultivated, 'domesticated' yeast. It harnesses the wild yeasts and lactobacilli from the surrounding environment. To do this, you simply mix a few teaspoons of flour with enough water to make a batter-like consistency. The usual advice is to add a few organic grapes or raisins; this is for the sake of the wild yeasts that settle on the fruit, which is incidentally how wine ferments - these wild yeasts get crushed into the juice when the grapes are pressed. I didn't have any grapes or raisins, but I did have some organic dried apricots, so I bunged one of them in instead. Then you just leave it in a warm spot for a few days, each day adding a little fresh flour and water. The water, by the way, should be filtered, or boiled and cooled - if you use water straight from the tap, the chlorine will kill, or at least inhibit the growth of, those wild yeasts you're so carefully trying to nurture.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from the rice flour. However, within three days the mixture was bubbling and smelled very like my old sourdough starter. In fact, it was ready for use a lot quicker than I remember my wheat starter taking.

Once the starter is ready, you can mix the dough. I used a pound of flour and two scant teaspoons of xanthan gum, plus salt and olive oil. The amount of water to make a workable dough didn't seem significantly different from a wheat dough.

In consistency it was fairly different, though: pastier and less elastic. It didn't prove much like a wheat dough either; after 20 hours there wasn't much expansion, though when I slashed the surface it was possible to see pockets (the picture on the left is immediately after mixing; the right 20 hours later). The texture was still pasty rather than elastic so it couldn't be worked and shaped like a wheat loaf. I had to just kind of pat it into shape. I left it for a second proof in a makeshift couche; after a couple of hours it still hadn't visibly done anything, so I consigned it to the oven. I was so pessimistic, at this point, about oven spring that I didn't even bother to slash it. This, as it turned out, was a mistake. It did have a fair bit of spring, as the lunar cracked surface will attest.

And so the the vital question: how was the finished article? It actually tasted pretty good. I suspect you could eat it and not guess immediately that it was gluten free. Maybe not guess at all. At any rate, it tasted like something real in its own right, rather than a dismal imitation. And it held together very well, which was a pleasant surprise: gluten free breads are usually far too crumbly. It was dense, and moist, which wasn't necessarily a problem, though I would prefer a more open texture. But if the trade-off is between open texture and crumbly texture, I'd prefer the dense that doesn't fall apart.

A bigger problem was a dry, rough, unappetisingly pallid crust. A hotter oven might possibly have helped with this, as might spraying with water before baking. Aesthetically you might get a browner crust by brushing with sugar-water before baking. Some people brush with oil, but I've always found that gives a rather unappealing fried note to the crust.

All in all, though, I was very pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out. Significantly better than any other gluten free bread I've tried, and a fraction of the price. I'll experiment further with the texture and crust issues next time, though given that I don't plan on eating it very often, it might be a slow process.