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blog_020509_a1

So, sorry for the delay in writing up my gluten free bread experiments. To be honest, working with unfamiliar flours was a little strange because they behave so differently from wheat flour and leavened dough. I got a selection of Soya, Rice, Gram (ground lentil) flour and some potato starch, four ingredients that seem to be staples of the gluten free bread recipe.

I thought for this first try, I’d take a recipe that strictly speaking, isn’t normal sliced white bread, but to me tastes amazing and i thought, would be a great starting point – potato bread – which is a flat dense griddle cake made with, you guessed it, potatoes but the addition of the wheat flour and egg to the potatoes gives the bread a gnocci-esque texture, not too squiggey and a little bit firm. And they are truely delicious, even though as I am Irish I am bound to say this, but as a vehicle for egg yolk and melted butter on a Sunday morning you can’t really go wrong.

Recipe –

300g potatoes,

(mashed with a fork or ricer or food mill – NOT with a hand blender or food processor as this makes the potatoes too smooth and a bit watery)

600g Soya Flour, Rice Flour, and gram flour

3 eggs

Vegetable or Olive oil (depending on your tastes)

Copious amounts of salt and black pepper (or whatever pepper takes your fancy)

Take 200g of the mashed potato, setting aside 100g of the potato in another bowl. Add 400g of the soya/gram/rice flour mixture and two eggs, a dribble of oil and salt and pepper. Combine all with a fork until it creates a stiff dough. If it is still a bit wet, add some more flour – either rice, soya or gram. Place it on a floured work surface to rest.

Take the remaining 100g of potato, add the egg and remaining flour and again a dribble of oil and salt and pepper. I added some powdered spinach to give the bread in the pictures colour and flavor, but you can use a whole number of different ingredients to give this dough colour – ketchup, tapenade, vegetable or fruit purees etc. Just take care to make sure that the texture of the dough is quite stiff after adding your additional ingredient; add more flour if the mixture seems sloppy.

Ok, time for me to ‘fess up – I used the doodle tin and doodle star for the first batch of my gluten free potato bread dough, but it was WAY too sloppy the first time round and when I took it out of the tin, it was like blanchmange :S. So, I had a little bit of creamy dough and green potato dough left and decided to make a C in the bread for Calypso (since calypso is our gluten free poster girl) – it seems the rice flour/soya flour and gram flour are less porous than normal flour and so I needed to add more and more flour to stiffen up the dough.

I shaped the green dough into a long sausage shape, and flattened it/rolled it out so that it was roughly 3 inches/7cm by about 15 inches/25cm in length. I took some creamy dough, shaped it into a sausage and placed with running down the centre of the green dough, wrapping the green dough round. Then, I took the remainder of the creamy dough, rolled it out to the same length and covered the green and white tube. I placed this big roll in the fridge and let it chill completely before taking it out and cutting off 2cm disks, which gave the C shape on the face.

If these instructions for making the C slices sound a little – or very – confusing, please leave me a comment below and i’ll post up some more images or sketches to better explain myself!

Once I had the little disks of potato dough, I used my fingers to flatten them out. I tried cooking them on a griddle – a hot dry pan covered with flour – but the C shape disappeared so instead I cooked them in a hot oven – 220c – for ten minutes on a flat baking sheet, and they kept the C and tasted not bad at all!

If I’ve missed anything out please leave a comment and I’ll write it up again. And if you try this recipe out, please please tell me how it went!