Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Beth’s Four-Flours Gluten-Free Bread

Last Sunday morning, Beth cooked up a fabulous breakfast to celebrate Audrey handing in the final copy of her thesis - remember Audrey? She has been writing about the Sarawak cloth-weavers and she made us that delicious Laksa and the Mohinga Fish Soup.

The piece-de-resistance of Sunday’s breakfast was, in my opinion, the Four-Flours Bread that Beth made from scratch, with her own special combination of gluten-free flours. It was absolutely yum-oh: it toasted well and harmonised perfectly with poached eggs, fried mushrooms and spinach & fennel.

















Here’s Beth’s Secret Recipe:

Four-Flour Bread Ingredients for a 1 kg loaf.

Wet ingredients:
water 400 ml
olive oil 3 tbs
sea-salt 2 tsp
maple syrup or carob molasses 2 tbs
soy milk 2 tbs

Dry ingredients:


Mix these four following flours together:
- Besan (chickpea) flour 1 cup
- Buckwheat flour 1 cup
- Brown rice flour 1 cup
- Potato starch 1 cup


With:
- 2 tbs xanthan gum
- 2 tsp batatis rhizome powder (Shan Yao - Wild Mountain Yam)
- 2 tsp Tandaco yeast

Seeds/Grains to be added later:
- 2 tbs linseeds
- 2 tbs kibbled oats


Directions for Bread-maker:
Beth uses a Breville Baker's Oven: Electronic Bread Maker (model BB280) that she bought from the Breville Factory Outlet in Ultimo, near the Sydney Fish Markets. She says it was a cheap one that she bought just to see if she was really 'into' bread-making. And now that she knows she really IS into bread-making (!) she says she will probably upgrade sometime to a model with a retractable blade, as the BB280 blade leaves a hole in the bottom of the loaf.


Add ingredients in the given order above, wet ingredients followed by dry, making sure that the yeast is the last one in. Set to Basic Bake (2 hours), with preferred crust setting.

The machine will take off and start mixing all the ingredients, letting them 'rest' for the appropriate times for the yeast to rise etc. You can watch if you want through a little window in the top - great for entertaining the kids on a rainy day (or is that only pre-Nintendo kids?) - when the blade starts kneading, the dough comes together in a ball and it is like watching a fat hamster scurrying around the barrel.

After the second rising (about 20 minutes) the bread maker will beep and you add the grains, mixing them into the dough for a more even spread.
Fancier model bread-makers have an auto function for adding seeds at this stage - you put them in a little chamber and they are released at the appropriate time.

Then it's a matter of putting your feet up and waiting for the house to be filled with that oh-so-delightful smell of fresh baking bread.

In a later post, we will investigate the traditional 'made by hand' bread method. My friend Stevie in Newcastle is a dab hand at bread, having made fresh, crusty loaves for his family of six for years. He knows his way around both the hand-kneading processes, as well as several bread-making-machines. Look out Steve - the bloggstudio is coming!!

Beth was saying yesterday that she is keen to try making a gluten-free Pizza base that the Breville instruction book says can be made in the bread-maker.

Mmmmmm - Yum-oh!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Yum-oh
this recipe looks Wonderful. Thanks so much.
Has Beth or anyone else we know ever tried making sourdough bread in their bread maker?
This reader - and i suspect many others - would love to know how it's done!
Love Jane XXX

ps after a lifetime as a cookbook reader i've never read anything better than this one, where food, friendship and sensuality are integrated in such a lively, quirky, intimate and interesting way.
XXX

PhotoVentura said...

Thanks Jane!

YES, actually, Beth HAS been making sour dough... you'll never guess what she uses?! Beth has also been making soy milk, using a soy-milk maker and there's always a tub of ground up beany mash left over... what, besides composting, could she to do with it?? Well, she has been leaving it out to gather yeasts from the air and then using that for the sour-dough raising agent - it's working well. Kind of cakey bread, but delicious!

I'm planning on harvesting Beth's expertise on this in coming weeks, so your suggestion to blog further on this topic is even more incentive. Thanks for your beautiful feedback, it's so nice to know you are enjoying the reading as much as I am enjoying the writing/photographing.

Katie said...

I love your blog! You're an inspiration.

This recipe looks great - my sister is gluten-intolerant so I'll have to keep this one in mind.

Katie said...

Thanks! How did you perfect your food-photography technique? Or is it a natural talent?

PhotoVentura said...

Over the last six months, I've read and read and read everything I can find on the web and elsewhere. You can find a list of the most useful sites I found at the right-hand side of this blog under the heading Food Photography Techniques.

And then I stared experimenting.

The early photos are awful and I was tearing my hair out a lot, wondering how on earth people like Marie Clair get their pictures looking so beautiful.

But slowly I am getting to know my cameras better and the technical aspects are starting to sink in...

About 20 years ago, I went to Art School in Sydney and studied photography - but that was back in the Dark Ages, before Digital was even thought of. And anyway, I've forgotten almost everything they tried to teach us - we were into 'Art for Art's Sake' back then and I didn't pay much attention to the technical aspects, prefering to leave things up to serendipity... lol

Different story now, and it is quite a journey... I also have been bashing around in Photoshop, slowly, slowly getting to understand how to use some of the tools, which has made a difference. And a decent 50mm Macro lens - that's the really beauty!

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