The gluten-free challenge

I love a good challenge as much as the next person and the one I've taken on is rather interesting: the art of making a half decent loaf of gluten-free bread.

In a bread maker, I might add (I'm not much into doing it all by hand).

It's not for me; I can and do happily eat all forms of bread at least 2-3 times a day. Shaun gets dreadful mouth ulcers though, and so far no doctor has pinned down a cause. The best they can advise him is to 'eat a wheat- and dairy-free diet'. Which he does ... very half-heartedly. I mean, that includes beer and what red-blooded Aussie male wants to be living without beer!?!

When the ulcers get bad (they never actually go right away), he reverts to stricter dietary measures. The thing is the gluten-free bread in the supermarket is about $6 a loaf and frequently very stale (there's not enough interest in GF foods to shift them any quicker, I assume).

So he bought a bread maker on the weekend. And here begins my challenge to bake a good loaf of GF bread in it. First attempt, with a supermarket GF bread mix: dismal. Barely edible. Second attempt is about to come out of the bread maker in the next few minutes. It looks better ... but still not that great. And it'll be interesting to see how it tastes. It's an Orgran ready mix, so it'd be great if it worked because you can get that brand pretty much anywhere.

What I really want to do is make my own bread from scratch though, so I have been looking around for recipes. Hopefully I'll spot one that sounds good soon.

I went to a product launch for a new Breville bread maker very recently and media were offered the opportunity to buy the model at half price. Oh, I wish I had, because it had an impressive GF setting. And of course the cheaper model we have now bought does not.

Anyhow, I am sure we will have many disasters before we actually come up with something edible...

Update: the bread is now done. And it's actually not too bad... (she says in amazement).

It looks like this:





And ... importantly, it tastes OK. A bit saltless, but a vast improvement on yesterday's attempt. Which looked like this:



Uh-huh.