Give Us Our Daily Bread
Hungry for a bagel or a sandwich on brown, rye or white?
These gluten-free recipes will satisfy the bread lover in your life.
Before food sensitivities turned my kitchen into a gluten-free zone, my children and I enjoyed bread as a daily staple. There was toast in the morning, sandwiches at lunch, and slices from a fresh-baked loaf with most dinners.
Back in those days, I was a superb bread maker, concocting homemade yeasty delights from scratch. But my bread making skills went out the door when faced with having to go gluten free. I was suddenly in new territory and it wasn't pretty. Without gluten, my baguettes were rocks and my dinner rolls were flat. If my sandwich bread wasn't crumbly, it had hidden caves, collapsed sides, sunken tops and pudding centers. My culinary ego was traumatized.
So I went back to the very basics of bread making. With or without gluten, the basics are the same. A short list of simple ingredients and the elemental process of mixing, kneading and letting the dough rise. With patience, some trial and error, and a little help from my friends, I got back in the kitchen, fired up the oven and mastered the challenge. I'm back making bread again, and believe me, gluten free tastes great!
If you've never baked yeast breads at home, you don't know what you're missing. Chef James Beard once called good bread "the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods." How right he was — and that includes the gluten-free kind.
This is an excerpt of an article featured in the Spring 2006 issue, which is sold out.
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