Gluten Free Bread

Is the bane of my existence.

Okay. Not really. But it frustrates me so much! 

Whether I follow the instructions perfectly or make modifications, it never turns out right. 

And there's no way I'm buying GF bread in the store - way too expensive.

My latest bread adventure comes from Hodgson Mill. It was a simple recipe, easy, straightforward. The unique stipulation on the box was that everything had to be room temperature, even the eggs! I had to put them in warm water. And the milk had to be warm and the butter melted. Fine. No prob. 

Now, I decided to make a little adjustment, out of curiosity, and I added some loose mango black tea to the milk as I warmed it and dumped it all into the mixture. The mango tea brewed has a bit of sweetness and I wanted to see if the mango flavor would come through at all. 

Okay, so I mix up my bread. The box - as every box of gf bread says - said to beat the ingredients for three minutes. This is impossible. Impossible. I dare you to try it and if you can do it, I will give up coffee. The dough, as it thickens, plasters itself to the sides of the bowl then crawls up the beaters to get stuck on the top part of the mixer. There is no way to continue mixing the dough so I must stop the beaters and scrape it down to free up the beaters. After a minute the dough becomes too thick to continue beating without stopping every 10 seconds.

I do what I can to mix it for three minutes, but it really is impossible. So then I plop it in my pan, and let it rise for the amount of time the box tells me. This time the dough actually rose - Hallelujah! I thought, surely this bread will turn out and I can have nice slices of bread to toast on my George Foreman grill. 

I put the bread in the oven (I even used my temperature gauge to make sure my oven was the right temp!)  until I needed to cover it to stop it from "over-browning." It said I need to put two layers of foil on, sealing the edges. Okay. TELL ME HOW IN THE WORLD I'M SUPPOSED TO WRAP TWO LAYERS OF TINFOIL AROUND A HOT PAN WITHOUT BURNING MYSELF OR SQUISHING THE BREAD? I tried, I really did, and my bread didn't over-brown, but my foil was not tight.

So I took my bread out after 60 minutes of baking (according to the box) and did the tap-test. Lo and behold my bread did not sound hollow, so I put it back in the oven. I repeated this every 5 minutes for 15 minutes. Still... my bread sank. WTF? 

It sounded hollow-ish on the last tap-test so I took it out to cool. After I watched Obama give the State of the Union speech I took the bread out of the pan and couldn't resist cutting it in half to see what had happened. It sank a considerable amount, much to my chagrin.

Well, there was a hollow space beneath the surface, like a big bubble, and the bottom of the loaf was dense and not airy like bread should be. Gah. So then I ate some. A lot. And it was gooood. The tea was a marvelous idea; it's not strong at all, in fact you can hardly taste it. But the taste that is there needs to be stronger. 

Flavor-wise this is a good bread. But, I cannot cut my loaf into slices. And the stupid thing sank. And there was a cave beneath the surface. And the bottom is dense.

The last loaf of bread I made I threw out because it formed a shelf, was rock hard on the outside and nearly uncooked on the inside, despite following all directions very carefully.

The loaf before that had a bad flavor.

The loaf before that tasted awesome but kind of fell apart in your hands and was very slightly undercooked I think. Joe and I ate that when we went camping.

Am I so inept at bread-making? Or is this the nature of gf bread? Or do these boxes suck? Or is my oven sabotaging me? Or do I have to scrape my bowl every five seconds to mix my bread for a total of three minutes? I know gf bread can be really frickin good. I don't know what's going wrong! 

Maybe I just shouldn't be making gf bread. Maybe bread is why I am gluten intolerant in the first place. Maybe I will just never bake or eat bread again. Screw you bread! Screw you body!

Now, a happy thing I see every day I go to school: