Reply #15: Okaaayyy... "Gluten Bread" [View All]

[housewolf]

This recipe is for a low-carbo, higher-protein bread than most yeasted breads. It calls for "2 cups gluten flour" which is sort of "horse of a different color." It's not a normal bread flour (not the same as "high gluten bread flour -that's a bread flour), it's a special flour that's been manufactured by washing the starch out of hard wheat flour, then dried and ground, sometimes called "vital wheat gluten". You'd find it in the health foods section of the grocery or maybe if your supermarket has a section of special flours like those from Bob's Red Mill, or something like that.

Being a higher protein flour, it will absorb more water than bread flour or all-purpose flour.

I've never made bread from gluten flour, so I'm sort of winging it here.

My copy of "Joy of Cooking" also the 1979 version, also shows 1/2 tsp salt for this bread. That seems low to me but I've looked at a number of low-carb bread recipes on the web and they all are quite low in salt. Salt has an inhibiting effect on yeast so it may be that with the gluten flour, the recipe needs less salt in order to get a good rise from the yeast. Adding more salt could give you a lower-rising, more dense loaf.

If you did use gluten flour, here is a tip for trying the recipe again. Hold out about 1/4 cup of flour. After you've mixed all your ingredients and the mixture is just all combined, turn the mixer off, cover the bowl with a towel and let it sit for 20 minutes. This will give the flour a chance to absorb the water. Then turn it back on with the dough hook and let it knead. If it's real sticky, add a little flour. You want a dough that is soft and moist - slightly tacky is okay.

Try adding more salt, maybe increas to 3/4 tsp the next time, and increase by a little each time you try the recipe until you get it to where you like it. Keep notes with each experiment so that you know what adjustments you've already made and how they turned out.

Hope that's a little help, anyway... good luck to you!

The Gluten Bread recipe from "Beard on Bread" calls for
1 pkg active dry yeast
1 c plus 2 tbls warm water
2 1/3 c gluten flour
1 tsp salt
(makes 1 loaf in an 8x4x2 pan)
so you can see that it uses much more salt than the "Joy of Cooking" recipe, also much more yeast in proportion to the flour (about one-fifth the flour and 1/3 the water) so you can't really compare the recipes (unless you converted it all to bakers' percentages) but I thought the salt qty was interesting.