Sandwich Bread

Ah, the holy grail of GFCF cooking: baked bread products. You can buy bag mixes, but to be honest, I never found one we liked at all. There are several good cake and cookie mixes out there, but the bread… the bread was elusive.

Until now! Here I will present to you the best sandwich bread recipe I have ever come across, by far. We start with Fleischmann’s active dry yeast. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change their formulas without notice. Always check your labels!]

Pour one packet into a small bowl with 1 Tablespoon of sugar.

Now, heat up 1 1/3 cups of water to between 105 and 110 degrees. About 40 seconds in the microwave should do it, but do test it if you have a kitchen thermometer available. Yeast is a delicate little creature, and if the water is too hot, it will kill it, and if it’s too cold, the yeast won’t fully activate, and both of these will result in a bad loaf of bread.

Pour the warm water into the bowl with the yeast and sugar. Give everything a good stir, then set it aside while you mix the rest of the ingredients. As it sits, a thick foam should start to appear in the bowl. This is good, it means the yeast is going to work.

In a large bowl, mix 2 1/2 cups of Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Gluten Free flour, 1 teaspoon of salt…

And 2 teaspoons of xanthan gum.

Next, add in 4 Tablespoons of potato starch, and whisk everything together very thoroughly. If you have a flour sifter, that’s even better, but you can get the job done with a plain ol’ fork, if you work at it enough.

Now, measure out 1 1/2 Tablespoons of your preferred type of oil. You don’t actually have to get another bowl dirty for this, I was just setting things out methodically for this post. You can dump it straight into the flour.

And the other liquid ingredient, 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar. This stuff is critical for the baking process, it’s some kind of chemical reaction thing with the yeast. I don’t understand how it works, but I know it’s necessary. Bragg apple cider vinegar is definitely the best option since it’s minimally processed, but other brands will work too–just make sure it is actually “apple cider vinegar” and not “apple cider flavored vinegar,” because the latter very likely contains gluten.

Now your yeast bowl should be nice and frothy. If it doesn’t look like this, something’s wrong. There’s absolutely no point in trying to bake this loaf if your yeast hasn’t foamed, because that means it’s dead. Try and figure out what happened–you don’t, for example, want to microwave the water with the yeast already mixed in. Not that I ever did that, or anything. Yeah.

Dump the bowl of yeast right into your flour mixture, and the oil and vinegar as well if you haven’t already done so.

And get to stirring! I find that a whisk just fills up with dough in the middle and doesn’t mix things together very well at all, a fork is really what you want to use. Make sure you scrape along all the sides and bottom underneath the dough to get all the flour nice and blended in.

Now scrape your dough into a greased 9×5 dish. You’re going to want a spatula to get it all out, because it’s a sticky, gooey mess.

Now, get your hands very wet, and press the dough downward into the dish and smooth it out. As soon as the dough starts sticking to your fingers, go put them under the faucet again. I just leave the faucet running on very low, as I usually need to re-wet two or three times before the loaf is in place.

See? Nice and pretty.

Place a wet paper towel over the top, and set the dish aside in a dark, moderately warm location for about an hour so it can rise. I usually put it in the laundry room with the door closed (but not while the machines are running, because the vibrations will cause the bubbles to pop, instead of filling up our dough with fluffiness.)

See? Nice and tall. Now pop it in a 375 degree oven for one hour…

And you will have bread! You’ll know it’s done when the top is hard and the sides have pulled away from the dish.

Turn it out onto a wire rack, and let it cool completely before slicing. Doesn’t that look delicious? It’s a little smaller than a typical bread loaf, but about the same size as a store-bought gluten-free loaf. You can always make two sandwiches, if you need to.

Happy Eating!

GFCF (and Soy-free and Egg-free too!) Sandwich Bread

1 packet of Fleischmann’s active dry yeast
1 TBS sugar
1 1/3 cups water

2 1/2 cups Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose GF Flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp xanthan gum
4 TBS potato starch

1 1/2 TBS oil
1 tsp Bragg apple cider vinegar