The expert-approved method for replacing bread flour when making gluten-free sourdough
Although the trend of making fresh sourdough bread took off years ago, we’re still so in love with the process. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for our gluten-free friends to enjoy the same tangy and airy bread. Gluten is an integral part of making sourdough, so we brought in an expert for a swap to help us create a gluten-free version.
Most tutorials for sourdough starters call for bread flour, a flour high in protein and also high in gluten. This gluten gives its structure to bread. Fortunately, Nathan Myhrvold, founder of Modernist Cuisine and lead author of “Modernist Bread” and the upcoming “Modernist Pizza,” has found a workaround for this problem. It uses a blend of gluten-free flours, with glutinous rice flour being the key component. “Among these ingredients, glutinous rice flour has played a major role in our success in baking: when hydrated in doughs and then cooked, it retains a special chewy character reminiscent of gluten,” Myhrvold told Tasting Table .
This flour is quite sweet, so Myhrvold combines it with a mixture of white and brown rice flour, tapioca starch, and cornstarch to get the right taste. As the flavor and softness are reduced, he then relies on xanthan gum to perfect the structure of his gluten-free sourdough. “It absorbs water and makes the mixture more viscous, helping to evenly disperse and suspend the starch particles in the crumb and partially replace the structure that gluten would normally provide,” he said of the thickener.
Read more: 25 delicious ways to use leftover rice
Does this method work for other gluten-free flours?
Although Nathan Myhrvold credits glutinous rice flour for the fluffiness of his gluten-free sourdough, he says it can also be substituted with other types of flour. “In our testing, we found that you can substitute flours for the mixture in many of our standard recipes,” he told Tasting Table. If you don’t have glutinous rice flour, sorghum flour is great for making soft pastries. That said, it’s also sweet like glutinous rice flour, so you can combine it with buckwheat flour for an earthy balance.
More than anything, your gluten-free bread will need help rising. Myhrvold uses yeast in its dough to prevent the bread from being flat. “For sourdough doughs, like sourdough, you should add 0.7 to 0.9 percent instant dry yeast with the water in the dough,” he said. “You’ll mix the doughs into a homogeneous mass and ferment them in bulk according to the recipe. This is for flavor development, not gluten development, so you don’t need to do any folding. “
Yeast is gluten-free and, although not necessary for regular sourdough, it speeds up the bulk fermentation process, in which the bread acquires its unique flavor and structure. The folding that typically occurs during bulk fermentation aims to connect the gluten strands together, which ultimately helps the bread rise. In gluten-free bread, yeast takes on this role and removes the need for folding.
Read the original article on the tasting table.
