Friday, September 19, 2008

Light White Bread Redux

Okay, so I've been doing a lot of baking with the almond flour over the last two weeks or so. And in general I'm really pleased with it. Does it taste like wheat? Not really. Is it pretty yummy anyway? Definitely. I've made bread, muffins, biscuits, and cookies and everything has come out more than satisfactorily. At this point, all errors lie with me.

That being said, I took another pass at the light white bread recipe found in Healing Foods. This bread is supposed to light in color and moist. I substituted some banana flour for some of the almond flour in my first attempt at this recipe. That experiment yielded a surprisingly dense bread but one that was super with butter and jam - my favorite way to eat bread. This time I executed the recipe as written. I won't reproduce the recipe for you here. You'll have to buy the book for that. But behold! Light White Bread.



This version of the bread came out golden and beautiful. It was light and moist. Tastewise it would have made excellent sandwiches although the bread is very fragile. It breaks easily, I expect due to the whipped egg whites that are called for in the recipe to give it it's lightness of texture. As before, I've consumed the entire loaf with butter and jam. It's one of my favorite things.

Will I be making this again? Oh, yeah!

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Light White Bread

My first SCD baking experiment was the Light White Bread from Healing Foods. Sorry no pics this time. I'm having some trouble with my camera software. I chose this recipe to do first because I thought it might make a nice option to have with sandwiches. Unfortunately, the recipe didn't come out as light or white. This is probably due to the fact that I was using a coarser grind of almond flour instead of a fine grind. I also substituted plantain flour for half of the flour called for. I substituted the plantain flour because I wanted to cut down on the amount of almonds I'm taking in and because I wanted to add extra moisture to the bread. Plantain or banana flour is really soothing to the gut and is very moisture absorbent so it makes anything you bake really moist. If you're going to use it in your recipes you should really add a little extra water to get the consistency just right. I just eyeball it.

The bread was dark and dense and super moist. It didn't rise very much but that's to be expected. It has a really mild flavor. If the texture were lighter and fluffier it would make an excellent sandwich bread flavor wise. Right now it's super delicious with butter and jam. I can't keep from eating it. I'm definitely going to try this recipe again with a finer grind of almond flour. And maybe some coconut flour. I hear coconut flour bakes up very similar to wheat - lighter and fluffier than almonds. I'll also increase the recipe slightly. Since the bread doesn't rise a great deal you'll need a bit more batter to have sandwich size loaf.

Next up: Muffin Mix Muffins from Everyday Grain-Free Gourmet