Did you know that the difference between an artisan baker and a regular baker is in the hands? Specifically, artisans touch and examine each product at various stages using their hands and use their bank of knowledge to judge whether a product is ready and the senses determine when bread is ready rather than an alarm or a machine. So explains Matt Brock, teacher, baker and trained chef at Brasserie Bread’s very first gluten free baking class.
Brasserie Bread don’t make gluten free breads for sale because it would be difficult to ensure that breads are entirely gluten free with all of that flour in the air. The owners aren’t 100% convinced that there is a market for them but from doing gluten free recipes I know that there is and that gluten free eaters miss baked goods a lot because these are the items that are forbidden to them. Here at Brasserie Bread, they use organic flour from Toowoomba and today we are using a special blend of flour for our gluten free baking.
Everyone else has brought aprons along and out of the seven in the class, one woman has been living gluten free for years while another woman’s daughter was diagnosed as celiac at age two. She is a former baker and has been talking to Matt for a while and he has been giving her recipes to try. When her daughter was given the official diagnosis at age two (after much pushing for tests with the doctors by mum) she was devastated that it was her own cooking that had caused it. “I felt like I had poisoned her” she says, so she threw all of her baking ingredients and tools away and hasn’t baked since. She is now hoping to have some tasty gluten free recipes to take home so that she can begin baking again for her daughter.
We start with biga, which is a batch of old fermented dough. This is a technique they use in the bakery here as the biga has already a developed maturity and flavour to it and adding it to the newly risen dough gives it an additional flavour. Bigas can last in the fridge for 4-5 days and every time you make a batch of dough and allow it to rise, you take out 200grams out of the dough and put it aside as the biga for the next dough.
The basic idea behind baking is that gluten forms strands that trap the gases that are produced when yeast comes into contact with water, sugar and flour and the strands become longer as the dough rises. In gluten free baking there is no gluten to form strands so they use xantham gum to get the right level of elasticity to the dough. The difficulty is getting the light texture in gluten free bread and as a fellow class participant says “gluten free bread is either cake or lead.” Today we will be learning how to make gluten free friands, a trio of frangipane fruit tarts with a sweet shortcrust pastry or pate brisee, a savoury tart with a savoury shortcrust pastry dough and a 450g loaf of bread.
We start with the breads which Matt slices up an example of. It is coated in sesame seeds and is a soft, light loaf and reminds us of a cornbread. The flour mixture is one that they developed through experimentation and the bread recipe was the most time consuming out of the four items to develop. The flour mixture is 75% rice flour, 12.5% buckwheat flour, 12.5% millet flour with some besan flour, more buckwheat flour and xantham gum. Without the xantham gum, the texture would be very wet and sloppy but he warns us to use it carefully as too much can result in a rock hard loaf of bread. Guar gum can also be used as a substitute.
We start with our own mixture, already measured out for us, and add the water to the sugar and fresh yeast-they don’t use a sourdough in gluten free baking and sourdough is just a wild yeast that has been cultivated instead of using a compressed yeast. And a tip, if you use dried yeast, that is more powerful stuff than compressed and you only need to use half as much. We mix the yeast up with the sugar and water with our fingers and then mix in the flour so that they are well combined.
We add the olive oil and milk mixture (you can use water or other types of milk instead of milk) and then the yeast mixture and biga and stir vigorously to combine. Then using the dough scraper we scrape down the sides and form it into a ball in the centre of the bowl and cover it with cling wrap and leave it to develop.
Matt tells us that if you are using grains you can add them in at the end as they can cut the gluten strands in bread as they are like little razorblades. Also, always soak the seeds in milk beforehand as they can draw moisture out of the dough otherwise. Bakers also use salt to control the activity of bread as yeast does not like salt and inhibits the growth of yeast and they use it if they want to stop dough rising.
Our next task while the bread dough is resting is to make the tart shells. He has made two types of dough for us (we get the recipes for everything to take home with us) and today we will be rolling out the tart doughs and filling in cases to make sweet and savoury tarts-the latter for our dinner! Gluten free dough is said to be crumblier and therefore can be more difficult to work with than non gluten free dough although this is a pretty good batch of dough and works pretty much like a regular dough.
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). For 31cents instead of $2 for 100g of popping corn, you can make batch after batch your very own air popped microwave popcorn at home or at work! You can also top it with proper butter or oil rather than that mysterious stuff they call butter. You can give it a sprinkling of salt for a crunchy, low fat late night snack or top it with a flavoured sugar for an afternoon’s sugar rush at work. And I’m going to show you how!
She quickly snapped back her arm as if the bag contained a cobra and leaned back down.
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