Gluten-Free Sourdough Bread

[guyshahar]

Hi there
I have recently become very interested in Sourdough baking, and, being Coeliac, need to make gluten free bread. I have evolved the recipe below - the dough proofs really well and the taste is great. The only problem is that the inside of the bread has a sort of uncooked quality about it every time. It is fine when well-toasted, but not really edible as untoasted bread - it is quite moist and a little sticky. I thought this might have something to do with the cooking time, but I increased this significantly - and tried it at both higher and lower temperatures, and it didn't solve the problem. I substituted brown rice flour for some of the sorghum flour last time, hoping that this would make it drier inside, but it made no difference.
Does anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong? The recipe is below.

Ingredients:
200g Sorghum flour
100g ground Quinoa
100g Tapioca flour
100g Potato starch
75g Chestnut flour
25g ground Hemp seeds
25g ground Flax seeds

120g starter
10g salt
1 tblspn live yoghurt
¼ tblspn baking soda
500ml water (around 30 degrees)

Directions:
1 - Put starter and 300ml of water in a large bowl
2 – Stir in ground quinoa, hemp and flax, chestnut flour and half of the sorghum flour (may need to add a little more water if not enough)
3 – Add the live yoghurt
4 – Leave for a few hours in a warm place.
5 – When risen, remove a small amount to use as the basis for the next starter.
6 – Add the rest of the water, and stir in all the remaining ingredients (may need to add a little more water if this is not enough).
7 – Put in a bread tin and leave to rise for a few hours.
8 – Cook at 180 degrees for around 40 minutes. Remove from tin, and cook for a further 10-15 minutes.
9 – Leave for an hour or so, then eat.[/u]

[Dan Lepard]

Hi,
I'd say it's the tapioca flour. It retains more moisture than any other grain flour and though that's useful in cakes, it's much less useful in bread and can lead to a sticky crumb. Replace it with cornflour/cornstarch, and increase the baking time another 10 minutes (reducing the oven tempertaure to 170C) once the loaf is out of the tin to help it lose more moisture.
Dan

[guyshahar]

Thank you - I will try, and let you know how it turns out.

Hi,
I'd say it's the tapioca flour. It retains more moisture than any other grain flour and though that's useful in cakes, it's much less useful in bread and can lead to a sticky crumb. Replace it with cornflour/cornstarch, and increase the baking time another 10 minutes (reducing the oven tempertaure to 170C) once the loaf is out of the tin to help it lose more moisture.
Dan

[guyshahar]

Thanks for the advice. I tried this again replacing the tapioca flour for corn flour, but it was then a bit too dry, so I tried adding back in just a little of the tapioca flour. The result was the best Sourdough bread I have yet made. The new flour blend is below:

200g Sorghum flour
100g ground Quinoa
100g Potato starch
80g Corn flour
30g Tapioca flour
75g Chestnut flour
25g ground Hemp seeds
25g ground Flax seeds

I'm thinking I might try adding a little more Corn flour next time, without taking any of the other ingredients down, in order to try to make it a little lighter. Do you think this would work?

The only thing that is not quite right now, is that when I started making sourdough bread, the loaves had a sweet, almost lemony, sourdough smell and taste, even if the texture was all wrong. That is not there anymore. Can you think of any reason why that would be?

[AZCook]

That's fascinating. What do you use for your starter, guyshahar?

Odette

[guyshahar]

Starter is just brown rice flour and water.

[Dan Lepard]

Regarding the flavour (very interesting question) perhaps the cornstarch "cleans" the flavour in the bread: some ingredients appear to do that. Where you are leaving the starter, flours and yoghurt in a warm place for few hours, try increasing that to 12 or 24 hours. As there is no gluten to get exhausted in the recipe, there shouldn't be a problem in doing that.
Dan

[guyshahar]

Thanks - I think I am probably not leaving it to rise long enough - around 10 hours or so for the first rise and much less for the second. I will try leaving it longer before using.