WRITING A BOOK

I am writing a book about gluten-free sourdough bread. Not a regular cookbook with recipes (well, just a few), but a book that describes the process and science of gluten-free sourdough bread making. If you understand why and how it should be done, a recipe is just something that follows naturally. It’s a best practices book, guiding you through the intricate process of gluten-free sourdough bread making. And I won’t do a whole range of breads. Just a loaf of bread. The one you eat everyday. It’s hard enough to make the perfect loaf anyway.

I’m not addressing to the industry or bakers who like to work with artificial ingredients like xanthan gum and softbake (methylcellulose) or by adding sugars, fat and eggs. That’s old school gluten-free bread making. Outdated and only used in big factories where time is money. What I am talking about is proper bread. Made only with nutritious flours, water and some salt. Short or long fermented. I will prove that you don’t need any of those weird additives. You don’t even need starch anymore! After you read my book you can make gluten-free bread how bread is supposed to be.

There are so many factors that influence the quality and yet there’s so little knowledge among bakers and especially self-proclaimed experts, mostly gluten-free influencers and recipe makers on social media. The amount of wrong information, incorrectly applied techniques, unproven claims, or just plain outright lies became unbearable to me. The worst of it all? Copycats spreading all the nonsense. For inexperienced bakers it may be quite hard to tell right from wrong and get out of that mud pool of lies. But I have decided to pull everyone out. It’s a dirty job, and due to the ridiculous amount of work I almost regret writing a book, but someone has to do it.

I will not only be telling you what works and what not. The centerpiece in my book is a completely new way of fermenting called PEAGD, which can only be applied to gluten-free baking. You can say ‘peaked’ as that word sums it up quite nicely. This technique is the only way to bake a gluten-free loaf without any added starch AND get an incredibly fluffy, delicious bread you want to keep on eating. It’s also a groundbreaking method to have a freshly baked sourdough loaf ready within 5,5 hours. It’s perfectly possible, but you have to start understanding science, optimizing your baking skills and investing in measuring instruments. In short that’s what my book is about. Building a bridge between science and baking. And yes, I will show you that you can also bake a great gluten-free loaf without high tech devices.

In the meantime I will be presenting a knowledge base here below!

 

KNOWLEGDE BASE

Psyllium does not exist

Have you ever seen those? Recipes that say: “add a tablespoon of psyllium”? That makes me laugh, because it is well known that psyllium is a hypersensitive binder. You will immediately notice a gram more in your dough. In fact, it is necessary to determine the amount of psyllium in tenths of grams. Adding a tablespoon of psyllium to your dough is just as strange as ‘put some ground coffee in your filter’.

But there’s much more to it than just accurate weighing. What online recipe makers and even cookbook writers don’t seem to realize is that psyllium does not exist. There is no such thing as profit. The farmer does not exist. If you don’t specify what you mean by it, you can say anything and in fact it could be something completely different. An attempt is usually made to qualify the psyllium. For example, they say that they use psyllium husk and not the powdered form. Or the coarse version, the finely ground version, or whether they mean the white or the brown psyllium. Nice try, but it says nothing about the quality and what effect it has in your bread.

Psyllium consists of seed coats of plants. It is a natural product and its quality varies from year to year. But fortunately that quality is measurable. An important factor is the swelling index. This is the ratio of the volume of the swollen psyllium (after it has absorbed water) to the volume of the dry psyllium. It is therefore a crucial indicator of the water-absorbing capacity. Each producer tests a year’s harvest and between a good and a bad harvest the index can differ by roughly twenty percentage points. That’s huge.

You can buy psyllium with different degrees of grind and purity. These factors also play an important role in absorption capacity. The finer and purer, the better it can absorb water. And some recipe makers still dare to claim that the coarser variant produces a better result. The knowledge about psyllium in the gluten-free world is still very poor.

It is completely normal that you need to add up to 25% more of one psyllium to your dough than another type to achieve the same effect. It’s actually unbelievable that everyone keeps pretending that psyllium is some kind of flour that you sprinkle into dough. Any recipe that contains psyllium should state the quality with which it was made. So for example:

Psyllium 20 grams, swelling index 70, mesh 100, purity 99%.

If this is not mentioned, the recipe is completely useless. That’s how great the influence of psyllium is.

Much more than regular bread, there is a hard science behind gluten-free bread and in the case of psyllium even an extremely precise one. And all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other factors that influence the swelling power of this intriguing soluble fiber.

So, there’s a lot of work to be done for recipe creators. But also for consumers and home bakers. Get used to the fact that making gluten-free bread actually has nothing to do with bread, but rather with precision chemical work. Too much trouble? Well, stay out of the kitchen. Prepare yourself for the next phase, because this is just the beginning.

 

No measure, no pleasure 

In gluten-free bread making we can skip many things compared to regular sourdough bread. One of them is bulk fermentation which main purpose is to activate gluten development. Although it’s great to toss out the name, we do need the process of a warm fermentation to activate bacteria and yeast cells, sometimes followed by a cold fermentation to further develop flavour. This critical point where you switch from warm to cold determines whether your bread will be under, over or perfectly fermented, so it’s an important skill to master. 

But how do you know if the dough is ready for a ‘cold retard’? Most homebakers I am sure will do this visually. Has the dough risen? Allright, let’s put it in the fridge. But you never know if the rise was too much or too little. More accurate is to take a measuring cup, put in a piece of dough and and wait for it to hit a certain percentage of rise. That could work in some cases and its success depends on how much marker dough you use and on the type of vessel you use to put the marker dough in. But with new ingredients coming up that show considerable rise during the first 12 hours of really cold fermentation (!), this technique is getting outdated in a gluten-free approach.

In addition, there is another more accurate option. As some of you may know: fermentation activity can be linked to pH. Monitoring pH can definitely help you in determining the tipping point, together with percentage rise, temperature and time. Baking gluten-free sourdough bread gets easier, more predictable, planable, well, basically gives you more control. Some say all this monitoring takes away the fun and romance of baking, but it’s actually the other way around: no measure, no pleasure. Think about that.