sourdough weekend

In this week's episode of the Great British Baking Show, during Bread Week, the contestants had to make two loaves of soda bread. Peter, whose brother is gluten intolerant, decided to make his gluten free, and Paul Hollywood complained that it was dry, stodgy, and gummy--and I was like, yeah, it's gluten-free bread.

Honestly, if gluten didn't make my entire digestive tract want to avenge itself on me, I would eat it and be happy. I've been gluten free now for more than 8 years now, and I only sort of miss it when I see the things that you can never make with gluten-free flours (oh, ye laminated pastries!). However, one thing I have managed is delicious bread.

This bread is so good, at least when fresh, that when I served it to friends at a pre-pandemic, pre-baby dinner party, they scarfed down most of the loaf. Unfortunately, gluten-free bread is tastiest on its first day of baking, and if you buy it in the store, it's already old and thus dry as the toast you have to make it into to make it palatable.

This bread is a sourdough. When I was pregnant last winter, after the fall semester concluded, I set out to bring a new creature into the house (other than a baby), a sourdough starter. Made up of water, brown rice flour, and time, my sourdough starter began its life, and I began my pursuit of the perfect loaf.

This obsession carried me through the pandemic, ensuring we had bread to eat on a regular basis that didn't have to be procured from the grocery stores we've been avoiding except for a restock every three weeks or so. It's also fun. And now I have two starters--a multigrain one (usually teff, sorghum, and quinoa flour but it varies depending on what I have on hand) and a brown rice one.

Currently, my go-to recipe and technique is from Naomi Devlin, who has a great sourdough course. Devlin, a UK-based cookery teacher, has been experimenting with gluten free and actually has been teasing me with the promise of laminated, flaky pastry to tempt me to buy another course from her. Her recipe and methods also informed my other go-to book, Aran Goyoaga's Cannelle et Vanille, which is just a marvelous cookbook.

Anyway, I had neglected my starter for a few weeks as I have been immersed in trying to keep up with my classes while working from home and being the primary calorie source for a rather plump baby, so I decided to bake two loaves--a boule and a sandwich loaf, just to see.

I'm still working on the right temperatures for everything. Our oven is obnoxious and doesn't keep good temperatures and heats all wacky, so it's a bit hard to pin down. This time, I think I ran the oven a bit too hot to start, since the boule got a bit darker faster than I would like, but overall both loaves were lovely. The preschooler happily eats it with salted butter and the grape jelly L made with grapes from the community garden.

While gluten-free bread can never fully stack up to the ease and simplicity of a wheat-based loaf, I'm glad I've found a good approach to bread that isn't stodgy, dry, and gummy.