Gluten Free Bread in Five Minutes

The Baking Revolution Continues with 90 New, Delicious and Easy Recipes Made with Gluten-Free Flours

St. Martin's Press

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INTRODUCTION

Making Gluten-Free Bread in Five Minutes a Day: Refrigerating Pre-Mixed Homemade Dough, without Wheat, Barley, or Rye

We are so excited to present our delicious five-minute gluten-free bread recipes. They let us bring a world of bread to people who’ve gone without for too long. This is the fifth title in our Bread in Five Minutes cookbook series, based on refrigerating and storing a large quantity of pre-mixed dough (mix once and bake many loaves from the same batch over the next five to ten days). Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day extends our revolutionary stored-dough method to yeasted breads made without wheat, barley, rye, or any variants of those grains. We’ve adapted the rich palette of world breads to our unique way of baking, and wherever we could, we converted our readers’ favorites from our wheat-bread books into gluten-free versions.

We are a doctor and a pastry chef who met in our kids’ music class in 2003—an unlikely place for coauthors to meet. In the swirl of toddlers, musical chairs, and xylophones, there was time for the grown-ups to talk. Zoë mentioned that she was a pastry chef and baker who’d been trained at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). What a fortuitous coincidence. Jeff wasn’t a food professional at all, but he’d been tinkering for years with an easy, fast method for making homemade bread. He begged her to try a secret recipe he’d been developing.

Our chance meeting led to a book deal with four titles and over a half million copies in print, and we’ve been writing cookbooks together ever since. Our first book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (now in a 2013 revised edition), created an unlikely team, but it turned out to be a great combination. One reviewer called us “the chemist and the alchemist,” though on any given day we reverse roles at will. Our partnership has worked because amateurs find our breads extraordinarily easy to make, yet aficionados find them utterly delicious. Our very different backgrounds help us write recipes that balance health, ease of preparation, and flavor. This book is our latest attempt at that balancing act—for people who don’t eat gluten. They want great bread, but they can’t find it in their stores—store-bought gluten-free bread costs a fortune, and it tastes terrible.

Our adventures in gluten-free baking all started with our blog, BreadIn5.com, which lets us keep in touch with readers who have questions or comments, and which, over the years, has also become a place to share new information that we’ve learned. We’ve heard funny and emotional stories of families baking together, and people have even written poems about their breads. Our blog space is also a forum for new recipe requests—some of the most common requests have been health related. People started to request gluten-free recipes back in 2008, so we added a gluten-free chapter to our second book, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. We got a tremendous response from our readers—one wrote that “making gluten-free people bread-happy is not that easy, but you guys have done it!” In the years since that book came out, requests have poured in from as far away as Europe, Asia, and Australia for a whole book of gluten-free recipes, made with the same five-minute method.

So we adapted our five-minute technique and wrote the book for which some of our readers have been clamoring. Our goal for these new recipes was not just to satisfy the cravings of folks who are on a gluten-free diet. We also wanted their friends and loved ones who do eat wheat to be happy with the bread, and for all of them—gluten-eating and non-gluten-eating alike—to be able to eat together. So every recipe had to pass the test of our family members, who are not celiac or gluten-intolerant and love traditional breads. They kept us honest and diligent in our pursuit of fantastic bread that just happens to be made without wheat. Zoë’s dad declared the gluten-free brioche to be the best bread he’s ever had, not knowing that he was eating something made with rice, tapioca, sorghum, and other gluten-free flours. Zoë knew her two boys would love all the sweets in the book, but when she saw how they finished off gluten-free sandwich breads and dinner rolls, she knew we were onto something. We all know how picky and (painfully) honest kids can be, so this bread had to pass as the real deal for them.

But it wasn’t just our loyal family members who were pleased. A fellow food-blogger who taste-tested loaves for us declared them to be “real bread” and said she never would’ve known they were gluten-free if we hadn’t told her. She is one of many who live without bread because she is gluten-intolerant, and her options are so bleak. One reader wrote to say “… thank you so much for creating these gluten-free recipes. It’s nice to know that even though I can’t eat gluten, I can enjoy amazing breads.”

And so, with the generous advice of our readers and their families on our interactive website, and after five years of writing and testing gluten-free recipes for our second, third, and fourth books, we’ve discarded everything that’s intimidating and created wonderful gluten-free recipes that come together quickly enough to fit into people’s busy lives. Our recipes will let you create your own homemade gluten-free bread, with the wonderful aroma, flavor, and chewy texture of traditional artisan loaves. We won’t ask anyone to knead; it turns out that gluten-free dough never benefits from it. And we’ve kept active preparation time to five minutes per loaf for the basic recipes, using our usual mix-once bake-many method. There are also two new gluten-free flour blends to keep on hand, so you can dip into the bin whenever you want to mix up a new four-loaf batch—no need to measure from several flour bags every time you mix.

As you read through the book, please visit our website (GFBreadIn5.com), where you’ll find instructional text, photographs, videos, and a community of other five-minute-a-day bakers. We’re also on Twitter (@ArtisanBreadIn5), Pinterest (Pinterest.com/BreadIn5), Facebook (Facebook.com/BreadIn5), Instagram (Instagram.com/BreadIn5), Tumblr (BreadIn5.Tumblr.com), and Google Plus (Plus.Google.com/+BreadIn5).

Happy baking, and enjoy all the bread!

So what’s the problem with gluten? For whom? A wee bit of science:

If you and your health professional have already figured out that you have a problem with gluten, you may not need this section, and if you like, just skip ahead to our discussion of gluten-free and non-gluten-free bread ingredients here.

But if you’re just starting the conversation and sorting through competing claims made in the gluten-free community, this next section may be helpful to you.

Americans in record numbers are trying gluten-free foods, and one often-quoted study estimates that 1 out of 133 Americans has celiac disease, and other estimates are as high as one out of a hundred. Indications suggest that the numbers are...