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Good gluten free bread has to be made at home. Yes, you can find gluten free products at the grocery store. In fact, the gluten free aisle at the grocery store is full of bread products that taste like cardboard. Bagels, sandwich bread, hamburger and hotdog buns - they are all passable if you toast them, or cover them with butter. But they add nothing to a meal. Most of the premade gluten free options taste like cardboard. And if you look at the ingredient list, you will see that they are made of starch, and chemicals. Not really the "healthy" option, despite the reputation of the gluten free diet as healthy(ish).
The reality is that bread is a food designed around the properties of wheat. And the very thing we are trying to avoid in a gluten free diet - the gluten - is the property that makes bread work. It holds the dough together, and lets it stretch and rise. You will see and hear lots of mentions of "developing the gluten" in bread recipes or baking shows. None of that applies to gluten free bread. Or at least, it does not apply in the same way.
Gluten free baking is all about replacing the glutinous properties of wheat to get a similar result. In this recipe, I do that with flaxseed and psyllium husk. The flaxseed provides a gel and softness. The psyllium husk provides structure. The two of them together do a pretty good job of mimicking the natural properties of gluten and making the dough workable.
If you want a more textured wholemeal feel to the bread, you can also add chia seed. It will make the dough more gummy, so I recommend reducing the quantity of flaxseed to compensate. So, instead of doing 1/2 cup of ground flaxseed, do 1/4 cup flaxseed, and 1/4 cup chia seed.
I usually mix up the dough, and let the bread rise overnight in the oven with a damp cloth over it. By morning, it is doubled in size. The ~8ish hours of fermentation time gives it a nice sour flavor.
Unfortunately, I have not mastered the art of just using the natural rise of the sourdough starter, and so this recipe also calls for baking powder and baking soda.
There is another version of this recipe which is just a "quickbread" with no sourdough or rising required. Click here for my brown quickbread recipe.
Breakfast sandwich made of a sourdough biscuit and cheesey scrambled eggs with spinach
Then, earlier this year, I made my own gluten free sourdough starter. Suddenly I needed a use for all the sourdough discard! Enter the Sourdough Biscuit. They have a tangy flavor from the sourdough, and a texture that is almost exactly like a proper biscuit. I use Bob's Red Mill All Purpose Baking Flour, which is a mix of chickpea flour, starch, sorghum flour, and fava bean flour. I love that this mix has some protein from the chickpea and fava bean flours, and no xanthum gum. It makes for a hearty guilt-free biscuit.
Please note, I bake my biscuits on my cast iron baking sheet. This toasts the bottom very nicely, and they slide right off the pan. I always put the pan in the oven to preheat. If you are not using a cast iron sheet, you may need to adjust the cooking time.
