Irish Brown Bread Recipe

Kayleigh here. On our recent trip to Ireland, Jason and I both fell in love with the warm, soft brown bread served with most meals. While 'Irish Soda Bread' can be found on almost every recipe blog around St. Patrick's Day, it seems this whole-grain, molasses-sweetened counterpart gets no love online. Going off our memories of the taste (and having seen the ingredients in a bread mix once), we set about recreating this.

This bread is definitely best when served warm and fresh alongside a hearty breakfast or sopping up a thick stew. If you have any left over after the first day, I suggest pre-slicing the rest of loaf and freezing it. The bread quickly dries out if left in the refrigerator, and the lack of preservatives makes it last a few days at best on the countertop.

Ingredients:
1 Cup Brown Rice Flour
1/2 Cups Sweet Rice Flour
1/2 Cups Buckwheat Flour
1 Cup Tapioca Starch
2 ts Xanthan/Guar Gum
1/2 ts Salt
1/3 Cups Rolled Oats (or other gluten free hot cereal like quinoa or brown rice flakes)
1/4 Cups Milled Flax Seeds
3 ts Baking Powder
1 1/2 ts Baking Soda
2 TB Molasses
3 Eggs
3 TB Butter, softened
2 ts Apple Cider Vinegar
1 1/2 Cups Milk

Directions:

1) Combine all ingredients from Brown Rice Flour to Baking Soda in one bowl, and the remaining ingredients in another, then mix both together. Mix thoroughly, to get out all the lumps.
2) Pour into a greased bread pan, then bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes to one hour, until the top is browned and an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Alternately, you can use a breadmaker on the 'quick bread' setting.

The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread Cookbook Review

Kayleigh here. Seems like it's about time for another cookbook review: this time, The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread, by Bette Hagman. If you are anything like us, then you have one tried and true bread recipe, and you find yourself using it over and over again, since you do not want to go through a string of failures again finding out a new recipe. Clearly, the writer of this cookbook was cut from a different cloth, since she has made the effort to test and compile hundreds of different recipes for all sorts of bread varieties, from hearty, distinctive Rye and Sourdough recipes to inspiring and rut-breaking Irish Soda Bread and Chocolate Cherry Loaves. If you have the hankering for the vast array of varieties a gluten eater has at their disposal, then boy is this a book for you!

Hagman starts you right off with a Q+A session, covering quite many common issues with gluten free baking, from bread machine quirks to water-to-flour ratios and how to combat differences in brand behaviors. And as if this was not useful enough, she follows it up with quite a comprehensive list of flours, covering how they taste, what they are best used in, and even what other flours pair well with them! No longer does the sea of GF flours seem so daunting, with this list as your guide!

Another interesting quirk to this cookbook is that nearly every recipe has multiple versions for different sized loaves. Built as a guide for the oven baker as well as the bread machine user, each yeast bread contains instructions for both, noting the differences in cook times and behaviors quite thoroughly. I think it is fabulous, since it opens me up to baking at a friend’s house that may not have the same fancy kitchen setup as we do. It also makes recipe swapping easier, for the same reason!
Out of all the recipes we've dog-eared in this cookbook, our favorite so far is the cinnamon swirl bread. We added a cup of raisins to the cinnamon ribbons in the loaf, and baked a beautiful, fragrant loaf of bread worthy of toasting, spreading with Nutella or butter, and enjoying in your pajamas on a cold winter morning. In fact, this is the first gluten-free bread we've been able successfully make french toast with, as most other attempts have yielded crumbly, wet piles of disappointment. Not this cinnamon bread- it held up to the battering, gained a lovely crust and moist interior, and stayed in one piece when taken from pan to plate- fabulous!

Jason here. This cinnamon bread was absolutely delicious. Kayleigh has been the one who has persevered and made bread after bread, trying to find recipes which are enjoyable. Each time I feel the bread gets slightly better. What started as dry, dense, and bland, as slowly become flavorful, light, and fluffy. I know for sure that the various bread making books which we have picked up, or had gifted to us, have done wonders. I for one really enjoy the desert breads like the cinnamon bread we made from Hagman’s book.

Unfortunately, we cannot link to a blog or website for the author, as she has since passed away, but she does have several more cookbooks available for purchase, covering everything from comfort foods and desserts to more healthy dishes and baking tips- all lovingly researched and written long before gluten-free lifestyles entered the public spotlight. We cannot speak for the other books yet, but we highly doubt you can go wrong with Hagman's creative culinary concoctions!

Brown Rice Bread Recipe

Kayleigh here. So, after many, many, MANY crumbly and dense loaves of bread, I think we've finally found a recipe for the perfect gluten free sandwich bread. The recipe? It came from my Great Grandmother.

Well, mostly. She had no concerns about using non-gluten flours, so I did have to modify it a bit to match our needs. But fortunately for us, nearly every baked good she wrote down the recipe for included 2, 3, or even 4 different sorts of flours. So instead of guessing at what would match what quantities of the All-Purpose flour, I just plugged in direct substitutes I knew would match the taste!

Another addition to this particular recipe came from the previous post, actually! After making a wonderfully light and fluffy Angel Food Cake, Jason wondered 'Why can't we just make sandwiches out of this?' Although a sandwich made out of cake sounds a bit tempting, we realized it was probably not the best idea, but there was nothing saying we could not take a couple pointers from the cake-making process.

For those of you who have made gluten-free bread before, you know how hard it is to make anything close to the light, springy wonder breads of yesteryears. Certainly, the right flour blend can help with this, but most of the success actually comes in the process. Sift the dry ingredients at least once or twice to introduce more air to the loaf. Make sure all the refrigerated ingredients are taken out well beforehand, so they are at room temperature. Before adding the egg, beat it with Cream of Tartar until it forms a stiff foam. And make sure to proof your yeast beforehand!

What is proofing? Well, just take your liquid (water or milk, depending on the recipe) and heat it until just slightly warm. Add a tablespoon or two of sugar, then pour in the yeast, stirring well. After ten minutes or so, the surface should be very foamy looking, which means the mixture is ready to use. If you give it a fair amount of time, and it still does bot foam, then either the liquid was too cold, or the yeast is no longer active. Either way, it is no good, and your bread would not have risen with it!

If you are using a breadmaker, like we are, then you do need take an extra step beyond pressing the 'start' button. Pay attention to the first stirring cycle. As soon as it ends, reach in and remove the stirring paddle. That way, the first rise can happen uninterrupted, and the second stirring cycle will not undo all of that. Really, this will make or break the final rise and texture of the loaf, so do not forget this step! Gluten-free loaves do not have enough elasticity or strength to rise a second time.

Well, suppose I should stop rambling. Onto the recipe!

Brown Rice Bread

Ingredients:

1 Cup Brown Rice Flour
1 Cup Tapioca Flour
1 Cup Tapioca Starch
2 ts Guar Gum
1 ts Baking Soda
1 1/2 ts Baking Powder
1/2 ts Salt
1 Packet Active Dry Yeast (or 2 1/2 TBS)
1 Cup Milk
2 TBS Sugar
2 ts Apple Cider Vinegar
1/4 Cup Mollasses OR Corn Syrup
1 Egg
1/2 ts Cream of Tartar

Directions:

1) Heat the milk until just barely warm, then stir in sugar and yeast until dissolved. Let this sit for at least 10 minutes, or until proofed.
2) Sift all three flours, guar gum, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a bowl. If you're feeling ambitious, sift it two or three times!
3) Break the egg into another bowl, add the cream of tartar, and beat with an electric mixture until very foamy, and you can form stiff peaks.
4) Add the milk mixture to the breadmaker, followed by the molasses/corn syrup, vinegar, flour mixture, and egg.
5) Set the bread machine for a 1 1/2 lb loaf, and press start. We recommend checking a couple of times early on, and scraping off the sides if they are not getting combined properly. Remove the stirring paddle after the first mixing cycle, them just let the rest of the process run its course as normal.

By the end, you should have a beautiful, airy loaf with an earthy brown color. And we promise, it tastes even better than it looks!

Jason here. I’ll be brief, I promise.

Finally a decent home cooked bread I could enjoy. All of the previous breads turned to bland tasteless mush. This holds its texture fairly well, while having a distinct bread taste. The bread itself is harder than a regular bread, but not in a dense sort of way. It is more like how bread feels after you lightly toast it, just now all the way through.

It is missing the elasticity that gluten brings to regular bread. This can make it crumbly at times, so I have taken to occasionally eating my sandwich with a fork and knife. I don’t really mind, it just makes it a little messier. 

All in all, this makes for very decent sandwich bread, if you can spare a little mess.

Product Review- Breadmaker!

So, continuing the theme of presents, we recently received a lovely housewarming gift in the mail- a breadmaker!

Noticing that it came with a recipe booklet, I was completely prepared to sit there and scoff at all the different wheat ideas I could never use, when I noticed a two recipe section for gluten free bread. Well then!

So, with all of the ingredients already lining the cupboard, we immediately threw a loaf together, and sat expectantly in front of the machine, watching it do it's magic.

Well, okay, we played a couple hours of Diablo III, then ambled back in shortly after hearing the beep. The loaf came out easily, perfectly mixed, with the lovely aroma of fresh baked glutinous bread.

The crust on it was lovely, although the top caved in after a bit- guess the liquid amount was a bit off. The bread itself was very hearty and thick- lovely for soups and burgers, but a little too heavy for everyday deli sandwiches. I would still recommend it, although I think Jason and I will continue experimenting to find a fluffier loaf.
Jason here- I used the bread for a couple purposes.
First I used it as sandwich bread. Every morning Kayeigh would make me a delicious turkey sandwich, with American cheese slices, and mayo. The bread was definitely too dense for this purpose. It also tended to break into pieces, since it didn’t have the stretchiness normal bread has. The taste was fine, tasting approximately like regular white bread. The search for good sandwich bread continues.
Next, I used the bread with some chili we made. I found the denseness of the bread made it easier to dip and scoop some chili onto. However, too big of a piece and it would just break into smaller pieces. While it was certainly okay for this purpose, and might be great if someone was just looking for very dense bread, I still prefer bread which holds its shape through a crunchier and stiffer crust then just being all around dense.
I’ll keep eating any bread we create, and we will be sure to report back and successful attempts we have that are worth noting.