Butternut squash and raisin spice gf bread

I had some roasted butternut squash left over from supper last night.  Some went into a lasagna with left-over chilli, and the rest I mashed and based a sweet spicy bread around.  This bread is a warm tawny colour, slightly sweet, slightly spicy, soft in the middle and crisp on the outside.  An excellent snack with a cup of tea, buttered if that is how you like it.  It would be good with honey if you like a sweeter bread.


200g gf flour (40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
200ml water
1 tsp yeast
75g roasted butternut squash, mashed
50g raisins
25g demerera sugar
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp oil

Mix all the ingredients together to a sloppy, lumpy batter.  If you use the kind of yeast that needs to be started in water then remember to prepare that first.

Place in breadmaker and set on basic loaf.  My Panasonic has 01 as the basic setting, and I chose large loaf and medium crust to ensure it had long enough.

In a normal oven I recommend a one pound loaf tin, 170C and about 40 minutes. Place in greased tin and leave to rise in a warm moist environment for an hour or two.  You should be able to tell it has increased in bulk a bit but it won't have doubled in size.

Leave to cool on a wire rack before slicing (though it sliced ok and tasted great when still warm).

Baking experiments - gf bread in a Panasonic bread machine - Phase 3: large white

Learning how the machine handles seedy bread and that with buckwheat. This time I decided to find out what the plain flour, water and yeast mixture produces - a 'white' bread

side view of loaf

Ingredients
500g flour (40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
625 ml water
3 tsp yeast (I have been using a lot more yeast than usual due to short rising time)
1 tbs agave syrup
1/4 tsp vanilla
1 tsp oil

Mix together in a bowl and pour into bread tin.  Set the Panasonic Bread maker on Setting 1 and tell machine it is an extra large loaf with a dark crust.  Lets see what will happen!

Well, what happened is that the batter rose a lot and collapsed when cooking.  Not a surprise really given how wet the mixture was.  If I was baking such a wet mix with so much yeast by hand I would have let it rise about a third more than the initial batter volume and then baked.  This turned out about 2.5 times as tall on the edges as the initial batter.  The batter was 5cm deep in the tin and the loaf is 12cm high at its tallest point.

collapsed top

However, despite the central collapse and the large hole left by the blade, the texture was even.  It hadn't produced the claggy bottom of the previous version, perhaps due to the different setting - but I don't know what difference telling the machine to do an extra large crust with a dark crust does.  There didn't seem to be any difference in the cooking time and there is no read out of the temperature.  I might ask Panasonic what these controls do to the cooking programme.

soft light slice

The bread is very soft and light - quite astonishingly so.  The slight rolling of the dough seen on the slice is probably due to my impatience - the bread was still slightly warm when I sliced it.  I find waiting for bread to cool in order to find out how it worked is the hardest part of baking.

note high sides and blade hole.  Shown next to bread 2

The initial cut through the middle of the loaf shows the dip in the middle and the hole left by the blade.  This may have been exacerbated by cutting before it was completely cold.

The bread toasted well the next morning though I couldn't cut it neatly.  The very light texture and the hole from the blade made this difficult.  As the bread is more moist than wheat bread the blade of the bread knife also tends to stick.

The trick is to manipulated the quantities of ingredients to get maximum lift with minimum risk of collapse.  I have some potato protein I have been sent to test as an aid for gluten free baking, so I think I will replicate this collapsed loaf with some of that to compare.

Baking experiments - gf bread in a Panasonic Bread Machine phase 2

The small loaf of bread I made yesterday worked very well.  I only used 200g of flour so thought I should see if it scaled up OK.  I made the same recipe with 500g of flour, the only difference was no seeds as I had run out.

Ingredients
500g flour (40% urid lentil, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
625ml water
50g buckwheat, partially chopped in blender
3 tsp yeast
1 tbsp date syrup
1 tsp cocoa
1 tsp oil

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and pour into baking machine pan

I set the process going, Rye 07 on the Panasonic, then part way through thought I should tell the machine I was making a large loaf (it has three settings).  It turns out that if you select the rye programme you can't adjust the size or colour settings.  Now, obviously, when I was studying the chart to start with I should have noticed this.  I didn't.

I am also not sure if I clicked the bowl with blade into place properly.  You can't test this by simply telling the machine to do a stir - a simple extra pulse button would be good.  I didn't look inside when it was in the kneading stage.  Yesterday, with the sunflower seeds in the bread, I could see in the finished loaf that the batter had been stirred as all the seeds were oriented by the blade in a circle.  I wondered because the blade was completely inside the loaf with I shook the bread out of the  tin.

I measured the temperature inside the loaf when it came out of the machine.  It was only 85C.  I waited until the loaf was nearly cold before cutting.  It is a little soggier than I would like so have put it back in the normal oven for thirty minutes. It would probably only have needed an extra ten minutes in the initial bake, but now it needs quite a bit of time to get back up to temperature.

When cooled I sliced the bread.  It is fine to eat but does show the slightly claggy layer at the bottom which shows that it didn't quite have the strength to hold the rise.  I would need to reduce the water.  The batter was very liquid.  I hadn't cut the liquid even though I had left out the seeds - I hadn't thought they would absorb liquid to any noticeable degree but it would appear they do.  The white blobs are the whole buckwheat grains - I didn't chop them as much as the previous loaf.

So, a bit more experimenting to do.  I don't think I would increase the loaf size given the dense base layer.  The loaf does produce a reasonable sized slice of bread.

The texture is lighter than a dense rye loaf but has some of the same moistness.  It holds together well and has a good flavour. It has enough integrity to make sandwiches and does not crumble when handled.

It sliced very easily and didn't disintigrate.  I have put the slices in the freezer in a polythene bag with non-stick paper between the slices.  The bread goes weird after two or three days at room temperature so is best stored frozen in individual portions.

Baking gf bread in a bread machine

I have been working on recipes/mixes which are suitable for people who are busy or not confident in baking. The plan is to have these recipes worked up so that when my flour mix is produced by Shipton Mill next month the recipes are available.

One of these is bread using a bread machine.  I bought a Panasonic bread machine last week.  The first test this morning produced excellent bread.

250ml water
200gm flour (40% urid lentil, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
50g buckwheat - lightly smashed in a blender (optional)
15g sunflower seed
1 tsp yeast
1 tsp date syrup
1 tsp cocoa
1 tsp oil

I used the rye setting rather than the gluten free setting, as it seemed closest to the timings I would use if making the bread by hand.  The first test produced a short loaf - the ingredients are sufficient to make a loaf in a small bread tin, and the container in the bread machine is large.  I'll run tests with other quantities later.

I had hoped to be able to mix the ingredients before the initial waiting time - all the recipe have this dormant period at the start - I don't know why.  I would normally let my ingredients sit for hours before shaping as this improves digestibility - I use processes similar to making sour dough bread. However, there didn't appear to be a button you could just press to activate the stirring action, so I rather awkwardly stirred things together with a silicon spatula.  Next time I would just mix all the ingredients first in a bowl and then pour into the bread pan.

sloppy mix in pan

I switched on, peering in every now and then.  I worried that the dough wouldn't be mixed as it is more of a batter and the rotating blade doesn't reach into the corners of the bread pan.

I worried it wouldn't rise properly, especially since I used the kind of yeast that should really be started off in warm water for ten minutes before adding to flour and I just chucked it in with the rest of the ingredients.  I worried it would stick to the paddle - after all it gets baked with the paddle still in the bread - so I added the teaspoon of oil and stirred it in.  I worried.

the paddle in action

the dough rising

After three and a half hours the machine went ping and I lifted out the loaf.  A few good shakes and the loaf came out of the tin and the paddle stayed attached to the tin and not stuck in the loaf.  The bread was an even texture and well risen.  The texture was moist. The flavour was delicious - haven't tried the teaspoon of cocoa before but it helped give a warm flavour and 'wholemeal' look.  Cocoa without the usual sugar and milk products is good for you - full of anti-oxidants, so I figure it is fine in a wholesome loaf.

top of loaf

bottom of loaf- hole where paddle sits

loaf pan - released well