Good morning.
This is Mary Frances at Gluten Free Cooking School and today I’m going to teach you how to make my Finally Really Good Sandwich Bread recipe. This is a bread recipe that I developed several years ago. It took three or four years to get it just right and we make it every week. It’s very good, it works well. It’s perfect for sandwiches. But, over time some people who have commented [on the recipe post] – (we have had over 375 comments on this bread recipe) – some people have trouble making it, so I’m going to show you exactly how I do it.
First we are going to start off with measuring water. I am going to do it on our digital scale today so you can see how easy it is. I’m going to put an empty jar on there. Then I’m going to hit “tare” to take the weight of the jar off. I’m going to pour in 12 ounces of water, which is 1-1/2 cups. This is lukewarm water. If you are new to baking, then I would suggest (highly recommend) that you get a thermometer and measure the temperature of your water because it needs to be in a very certain range for your yeast to work well. If you have been baking a long time, then you know you can just touch the water and know it’s at the right temperature, which is what I do now, but for the first three or four years I measured it every time. You want to measure it so you don’t kill your yeast.
So now that we have our 12 ounces of water, add 1 tablespoon of yeast and 1 tablespoon of sugar. Gently stir that up and then set it aside to proof. This is active dry yeast that I’m using. Usually I use bread machine yeast, but this is what I had today. For active dry yeast, you do have to put it in water before you use it and let the yeast activate. Bread machine yeast is made to be used in bread machines and you don’t have to put it in water. That’s what it looks like. We are going to set it to the side and let it do it’s stuff.
Alright… now we’re ready to do our flour. So, again, we’re going to use the scale. I put my mixing bowl on top of the scale, press the tare button to zero it out, and we need 12 ounces of flour. Now I know a lot of you hate measuring out lots of different flours and with the scale you don’t even have to get a measuring cup. I’m adding 12 ounces, so I put 12 ounces in. So, when you are doing it backwards you can’t see the scale. 10, 11, 12! There we go. Now the flour mix that I’m using today is my all purpose flour mix.
It’s 3 parts brown rice flour, 3 parts corn starch, 2 parts sorghum flour, and 1 part masa harina. Now, if you haven’t used the masa harina before, this is what it looks like. You can usually find it in the Hispanic section of your grocery store.
To this we are going to add our xanthan gum. Now, the “finally really good sandwich bread recipe” that has been on my web site for years calls for 2 teaspoons of xanthan gum, but I’ve recently tried it with a whole tablespoon, which is 1 teaspoon more than I had been, and I really like the results, so we are going to add one tablespoon, and now we need 1 teaspoon of salt. Now if you make this bread and you feel that it tastes a little bland, you can always add more salt to it and that will give it more flavor. Just mix that up (time is 5 minutes at this point). That’s all we have to do as far as the flour. Set that to the side and now we are going to do our eggs.
We don’t have to weight these, but you know what, lets just show you because this is pretty cool. Every large egg is supposed to weigh 2 ounces. So, the reason that I have started weighing my eggs like in this case is because they don’t always weigh 2 ounces! Let’s see… we are going to use 3 eggs so we get 6 ounces of egg. We’re not quite there, so I’m going to get out one more and I’m just going to add more egg white to get to 6 ounces. Now, egg whites really help improve the structure of baked goods and they are drying, so if you are making cake or bread or anything and it’s too moist, too wet, then you might try adding just egg white. Okay… To our eggs we are going to add 1-1/2 tablespoons of oil and a teaspoon of cider vinegar.
You see our yeast is starting to do a little bit of foaming on the top, so we know we have good yeast. Let’s mix up our eggs. You want to get them mixed up until you can’t see any of the separate yellow and whites, and it should be a little frothy. Pretty good.
Now all you do is add all of our ingredients together… flour, eggs, and the yeast. Now give this a few quick stirs with the spoon and then we are going to switch over to the mixer. Now, this step is key. Regardless of whether or not you are going to use your bread machine or bake this bread in the oven, you want to get it really mixed up. It should be a perfectly smooth dough, and that’s just really hard to do with a spoon, and it’s hard for the bread machine to do with just using the paddle. So, I use a hand mixer or you can use a stand mixer if that’s what you have, and I mix the bread for four minutes. One thing this does is it gets the xanthan gum really mixed into the bread so that it can do it’s job, and this is also when you are going to be able to tell if your bread is going to turn out, because if the dough looks right after you have mixed it up, then you are pretty much guaranteed that your dough, your bread is going to rise well and be lovely, so lets do this.
Alright. Now I’ve mixed my bread for four minutes and I want you to look at the dough closely. You can see that it’s perfectly smooth, and that is the consistency that gluten free bread dough should be if it’s going to get a good rise. Then turn the mixer back on because I want you to see what the dough looks like when it’s being mixed. So, two things to note. When we made the Chicago deep dish pizza and we were mixing the dough, there were some deep crevices in the dough. This is a wetter dough than that and it doesn’t have those crevices. [Note: the pizza class used to come before the bread class; it now comes later in the progression]
Another thing that this dough does is that it usually crawls up the mixers and that is fine. So, your dough should be doing that when you mix it. If you are mixing up your bread and your dough doesn’t look like this, if it’s not this wet, then add water and just add it gradually until it gets to this consistency. Bread is notorious for being a little bit difficult and the amount of water that you need for a loaf of bread in any given day can vary by several tablespoonfuls. So, add the water, but then if it doesn’t look like this, then go ahead and add a little bit more water, and a little bit more water until it looks like this, because if your dough is stiffer than this, if it’s not this wet, it’s not going to rise and you are going to end up with a big old hunk of heavy bread that you could use as a door stop!
Okay, so the next step is to put the dough into the loaf pan and then we are going to let it rise. So, let me go get my loaf pan and get everything ready, and then we’ll do that. Alright… Here we have a standard loaf pan. You don’t need anything fancy to make this bread. It’s meant to be a simple and relatively inexpensive bead for which you do not need any special tools. I sprayed that with a little bit of Pam. It’s not the baking Pam – it doesn’t have any flour in it. You could also just pour a little bit of oil into your pan and rub it around. Now, you want to do that so your bread is going release from the pan easily once it’s done baking.
Okay, so lets just scoop this into here. If you’re making your bread with the bread machine, the only different thing that you would do at this point is to put your dough into the bread machine. This bread does not need multiple rises. We are going to put it right into the pan, let it rise, and then bake it. No kneading. It’s very simple. Okay, so we have our dough in our loaf pan. We’re just going to spread it out like this. Push it down into all the corners.
Now, one thing to do if you have been having trouble with this bread recipe. One of the problems that you can have is if you are not using a digital scale to measure then you may be measuring more flour or less flour than what I actually use. So, if you want to and if you have maybe a scale that’s not digital, just an old-fashioned kitchen scale, weigh this bread. Try to take out the weight of the loaf pan. But, the dough itself should weigh right at 2 pounds, and if you have that amount of bread dough then you have probably been doing it right.
So lets take this over and I want to show you how I put it to rise. Now, our stove is not very energy efficient and when it’s heating a lot of heat comes up through this eye. So I just put a cooling rack on top of it and set my bread over it to rise. It’s too hot if you put the bread straight onto the eye, it will start cooking the bottom and we don’t want that. We just want a nice, warm place. I’m going to cover the top with saran wrap. I’m going to spray the saran wrap with a little bit of Pam so that it doesn’t stick to the top.
My grandmother always covered everything with a wet dish towel when she put it up to raise but the last few times I have done that I have forgotten to check the bread carefully and the dough stuck to the towel and then when I took it off my bread deflated, so I don’t want to do that. I want to put saran wrap with oil on it so that even if the dough touches the saran wrap it will come off easily and not mess up the bread. So, I will leave this to rise until the dough is up to the very rim of the pan and then we will cook it.
Now I want you to notice that I’m already preheating my oven. It’s probably at least still 30 minutes until we are going to put the bread in but I want to make sure that my oven good and hot and that it has enough heat to rise, so it’s already preheating. We will have to live with this energy waste. So, we will check back when the dough has risen to the top and then we will put it in the oven and let it bake.
Okay, so here’s the dough after it’s risen and as you can see it got a little bit higher than I wanted it to because I ran to the grocery store in the middle and let it rise a little bit too long. So we are going to just put it straight into the oven at 375 degrees.
One question you might have is how long should the bread rise and there is really not a definite answer to that because it depends on the amount of yeast that you have in your recipe and the temperature that the bread is rising at. So, if your house is warm, you know if it’s the winter and you have the heat cranked way up then it’s going to rise faster than if it’s the winter and you don’t have the heat cranked up. So you just have to keep an eye on it and that’s why all bread recipes say “let it rise until double in volume, let it rise until it reaches the top of the pan”. You can’t really go by the time. You just have to look at the dough and see. So, we will let that bake for about 50 minutes and it should be done. See you then. Bye!
Alright. Our bread is ready so lets take a look at it and get it out of the oven. I know it’s ready because it is a deep brown color, when I tap on it it sounds hollow, and it’s been in the oven for somewhere between 50 to 60 minutes. So I want to take it out and because I let it rise a little too long, it kind of overlapped and just slide a knife under it to make it come out. I’m going to go ahead and take it out of the pan to cool. Now if you leave it in the pan the moisture in the bread is going to start condensing around the sides and you will get a soggy bottom. So, go ahead and take it out and leave it there to cool. It has a good structure to the crust so I’m not worried about it falling. Some people say that you need to let it cool in the pan or avoid drastic temperature changes, but that hasn’t been my experience. I just take it right out of the oven, take it out of the pan, and leave it to cool. Now, it does need to cool 15 to 20 minutes before you try to cut it. If you try to cut it while it’s hot, it will just squish down from the pressure of the knife, so be sure to let it cool and then enjoy your bread.