Making allergen-free whole grain bread: An experiment
One of my dearest goals in life is to figure out how to make a decent allergen-free whole grain bread. And muffins. Especially muffins.
I’m assuming that bread will be more difficult to produce, so I decided to tackle that task first, since I’ll probably need to make dozens of loaves before I succeed. Chef Ben suggests that changing one problem ingredient at a time is the best way to determine the effect of each ingredient adjustment, so for today I began my bread making journey by baking two versions of a nearly-whole-grain gluten-free bread: a “control” loaf following the recipe on the bag of King Arthur gluten-free whole grain flour blend; and a “treatment” loaf using the egg replacement suggested by the flour’s manufacturer, which contained flax, water, and baking powder.
(Both loaves also contained milk and corn, in the form of baking powder and xanthan gum, which I did not replace in this first trial.)
Mixing the doughs was a messy process which nearly burned up my 1970s-era hand mixer and flung bits of dough all over the kitchen, but the results of the two recipes felt and looked pretty similar:
Per Recipe
Egg Replacement
The dough blobs appeared to rise similarly. After baking, however, it was clear that the non-egg loaf sank in the oven.
I couldn’t taste-test the original recipe loaf, so I “volunteered” my son to do so. He thought that both loaves were dense, but the egg-free one was “spongier”. He felt that the sponginess soaked in the margarine he spread on the egg-free slice more than the original recipe slice, which in his opinion was a bad thing. He personally wouldn’t want to have a sandwich made with either of them, due to the density, but thought they tasted reasonably ok, and slightly cornbread-like.
I tried a little of the egg-free bread, and it was, indeed, spongy (and also vaguely cornbread-like). I detected a slight baking powder aftertaste. I think it would make reasonably good toast, or bread cubes for use in recipes, but it would be nice to figure out a way to de-spongify it a bit before moving on to replace the milk and corn-containing ingredients.