Gluten-Free Herbed Cheese Bread

The snow is piled up to the window sill after the storm last week (and the Science Teacher still didn't have a snow day!) and the forecast calls for the temperature to sink to 10 or 20 below night. We're hunkered down with cups of coffee, Car Talk, and the blessed quiet of the Little Pottamus's nap time. What better time to bake a loaf of bread?

Yeasted bread has become less and less a part of my life since I gave up gluten. I don't eat sandwiches anymore, and when I want something on which to spread my nut butter for breakfast, I'm happy with a rice cake or corn thin or slice of gluten-free frozen bread. In the beginning, I spent quite a bit of time trying out various gluten-free mixes and invariably ended up eating something that tasted like cornstarch. Dislike really doesn't describe my feelings toward the taste of cornstarch.

Quick breads, on the other hand, I make far more than I used to. Pre-celiac, I wouldn't really have considered quick bread "bread." Corn bread, ok, and maybe the beer bread from Joy of Cooking, but otherwise I thought of quick bread as dessert. Now a warm quick bread with a bowl of soup takes me back to the days when I took for granted the luxury of cleaning that bowl with a crust of bread. Bread is less a set of ingredients than a state of mind.

I've been wanting to try a gluten-free version of Herbed Cheese Quick Bread from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special for some time. One reason that I prefer quick breads to yeasted breads is that they need no refined starches or flours to make them taste good. I have yet to discover any good yeasted bread recipe that isn't at least one-quarter starch. I would also say that I haven't decided for myself how much starch is too much, an attitude that gets in the way of my yeasted bread enjoyment. What is your attitude towards starch? I'd love to hear what other people think. In any case, here's a yummy starch-free recipe, perfect for the upcoming football "holiday." If you like this one, you might want to try my Brown Bread recipe.

Gluten-Free Herbed Cheese Bread (adapted from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special)

2 c. of gluten-free flour (I used 1/2 c. brown rice, 1/2 c. sorghum, 1/2 c. teff, and 1/2 c. GF oat flours)
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. xanthum gum
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. brown sugar
1/3 c. fresh, chopped scallions or chives
1/2 tsp. fresh, chopped thyme (1/4 tsp. dried)
1 1/2 c. crumbled (not shredded) sharp cheddar cheese (low-fat cheese works fine)
1 lightly beaten egg
1 c. milk

Preheat the oven to 375 and oil a 9 x 5 loaf pan. Combine the flours, baking powder, sugar, and salt, and stir well. Add the herbs and cheese, and mix. Combine the egg and milk in a bowl. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Stir to mix. Pour batter into the loaf pan. Bake for 45 min to an hour or more. Don't underbake quick breads! Just keep checking it until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Adopt-a-Gluten-Free-Blogger Healthy Resolution Edition: Straight Into Bed Cakefree and Dried

I've wanted to participate in one of the Adopt-a-Gluten-Free-Blogger events--conceived of and sponsored by Book of Yum--for quite a while. It's such a great idea--giving us bloggers an opportunity to interact with each other on a somewhat deeper level than the normal reading and commenting. When I saw this month's theme (Healthy Gluten-Free Recipes), I knew I needed to get baking so I actually could create something on the web instead of just spending (way) too much time surfing. It feels healthy to be writing instead of only reading.

One of the reasons that I chose Naomi of Straight Into Bed Cakefree and Dried is that her dietary constraints and subsequent recipes really demand that we confront the question "What is bread?" The more I cook and bake gluten-free food and talk to other people about eating gluten free, the more I've been thinking about this question. Is bread a set of ingredients or an experience? If your "whole-grain" bread is half cornstarch, does that make it equivalent to the wholesome whole wheat of our past breakfasts? What if there's no flour at all? Who would call that bread, and who wouldn't? These aren't meant to be rhetorical questions; they are questions that increasingly intrigue me.

It always comes back to Shakespeare! Juliet, of course, said "What's in a name. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But then remember Anne of Green Gables. She said "I don't believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage." At least where bread is concerned, I think I agree with Anne. Eating "bread" is somehow different than eating "rice cakes."

In the past, Naomi has posted more conventional gluten-free recipes that I've made, adapted, and riffed off of: her Teff Pita Breads were the basis for one of my first gluten-free Middle Eastern meals. Currently, Naomi's following a much more restrictive diet in the hopes of getting her digestion back on track (no pun intended). The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) eliminates all grains, including gluten-free ones; processed foods; most dairy; all refined sugar; and other foods. I'm tempted to say, wow, that sounds terrible, but I won't. I know how adaptable we are to new diets and how restriction often sparks our culinary creativity. Come to think of it, that bit about restriction breeding creativity is true about a lot of life.

Another reason I won't say, wow, that's terrible, is the recipe I made for this Adopt-a-Blogger event. I chose Naomi's Hazelnut Pan Bread for a few reasons. First of all, it looks fabulous. Naomi takes beautiful pictures of her food. Second, with 1-2 eggs, enough butter to grease the pan, and no refined starches, it is definitely a "healthy" recipe. Third, since I don't have ready access to hazelnut butter in a jar, this recipe was a great excuse to use my new hand-turned grain/nut mill!
Fourth, she definitely has a good sense of food is what you call it. Here's a quote from her Hazelnut Pan Bread post:

"'Is that cake?' asked Fin incredulously as he was drawn in nose first, on a ribbon of hazelnut scent.

'Cake?' I chortled indulgently, 'of course it's not cake - who has cake for breakfast? It's hazelnut pan bread Fin, sit down and have a slice.'

And Fin sat down and ate two slices of not-cake..."

I made Naomi's recipe as written, except that I used one egg (I only had one on hand) and a very modest pat of butter in my small cast iron skillet (maybe 1-1.5 tsp.). The first time, I finished it under my broiler for 10 min and the top completely charred. So I scraped off the top and ate the rest--not pretty but definitely yummy. The second time, I finished it in a preheated 450-degree oven for 10 minutes. It still slightly charred around the edges. For a third try I might try 400 degree for 8-10 minutes, checking it every few minutes.

In any case, the Pan Bread was filling, moist, and rich. But in spite of that I didn't feel like I was being indulgent--it's a very healthy recipe and makes good use of a small amount of fat and natural sweetener. Seemed like bread to me.

Quinoa Pizza Crust

I've always loved pizza. Pizza for sleepovers. Pizza for end-of-season elementary school basketball team parties. Pizza nearly every night in college (remember someone knocking on doors around 11 or 12 trying to get together enough people to buy pizza at $1/slice?).

I grew up on Pizza Hut and Little Caesar's, usually on Friday nights. Those days, after my ballet lessons, we'd pick up a pizza and eat the breadsticks on the car ride home. That pizza was always much more edible hot than the day after. I remember discovering "gourmet" wood oven pizzas in high school with "exotic" toppings, like BBQ chicken, and the idea that everyone could order their own.

When I moved to Vermont, I discovered American Flatbread. My favorite was the Punctuated Equilibrium, a combo of red sauce, mozzarella, kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, and local goat cheese. When I was in graduate school, the Science Teacher and I had weekly date nights at Flatbread after my late seminar. We'd order pizza--half with sausage half without--split a salad of local greens and talk about Slavoj Zizek. Then came my diagnosis...

The first gluten-free bread I made post-diagnosis was a pizza crust. As bummed as I was never to eat another Moonshadow (red sauce, mozzarella, feta, artichoke hearts, spinach, roasted red peppers, and walnuts) at Positive Pie, I was comforted to know I didn't have to give up pizza altogether. I've tweaked the first recipe I ever tried here and there, subbing quinoa flour for some of the brown rice flour and starch, but having found a recipe that worked, I didn't really experiment with other recipes.

Until this week. We had plans for dinner and Euchre with friends on Friday. Our friend asked the Science Teacher whether we could order pizza. "Great," the Science Teacher said, "except Kara won't be able to eat it. How about we'll bring the crust and you supply the toppings?" I was feeling a little experimental so I looked through some cookbooks for inspiration. I ended up perusing Jane Brody's Good Food Book. She's a science writer for The New York Times, and her cookbooks all revolve around the premise that whole grains are good for you and sugar/refined grains aren't. She's also the anti-Atkins--you should read her praising the nutritional qualities of the potato. The Good Food Book also is half nutritional information, making it a great cookbook for people who love to read about the food you're eating. I've been cooking and eating from her cookbooks since I was a kid.

She gives a recipe for a brown rice pizza crust. Not brown rice flour, the whole grain, mixed with mozzarella. I thought it sounded somewhat strange, but I'm used to weird ingredients turning into phenomenally tasty food (my chickpea brownies come to mind) by now. I googled the recipe to see whether others had tried it and came up with a few hits describing a similar-sounding crust in Veganomicon. In fact, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen just used a brown-rice crust in a quiche. Sounded promising.

Here's the two mini-pizzas from brown rice I made for lunch to try out the recipe. I mixed shredded mozzarella into one crust and a parmesan/nutritional yeast combo into the other. I liked the parm/nutritional yeast crust though the Science Teacher thought the mozzarella crust had a better texture. Neither particularly tasted ricey, which I found surprising. The crust was also solid with a nice crunch--you could pick it up without fear of disintegration. I made a rice crust and a "regular" crust for our Euchre night--both were a hit (well, at least they were all eaten)!

Last night, when we were having a take-out food night (a very rare occasion in our house) with friends, I decided to make myself a quinoa crust using the same technique instead of ordering out. If you're new to quinoa, definitely give it a try. It has a ton of protein, a nutty flavor, and a consistency similar to that of couscous--and it cooks up in about 15 min.

I liked the quinoa crust as much as the rice version though it took a bit more egg to make the grains stick together. The crust was crunchy with no detectable sogginess and substantial--I could pick it up and eat it. I topped my pizza with red sauce, mozzarella, feta, walnuts, chicken sausage, caramelized onions, and sauerkraut. Yum!

Quinoa Pizza Crust
This recipe could easily work with any whole grain. If the grain is sufficiently glutinous (i.e. a sticker rice), I think you could omit the eggs (and cheese) for a vegan crust.

2 1/2-3 cups cooked quinoa (1 cup raw quinoa--I like to toast my quinoa before adding water)
1 whole egg plus 1 white
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp. dried oregano

1/4 cup parmasan
2 tbsp. nutritional yeast.
(or try a 1 cup of shredded mozzarella instead of the parm/nutritional yeast combo)

Preheat the oven to 450. Mix all of the ingredients into the quinoa thoroughly. Oil a baking sheet and sprinkle liberally with cornmeal. Press the quinoa into a pizza-like shape on the baking sheet. Bake for 20 min. Create your dream pizza--don't forget the walnuts--and bake for about more 10 min.

Gluten-Free Breakfasts

I love breakfast. But as I've said before, I'm a creature of habit. Before I was diagnosed, I ate a bowl of oatmeal almost every morning. There were a few weeks after my diagnosis that I thought I was going to have to give up oatmeal, but I was lucky. I found out about my gluten intolerance right about the time Lara's Gluten Free Oats began to be available at our local co-op. Besides those few panicky weeks, I have little to complain about. My temporary oatmeal hiatus, however, has prompted me to diversify my breakfast fare. I'm hedging my bets against future GF oatmeal price spikes and shortages...

I've compiles a picture of what I might eat for breakfast, mostly because early on I spent a ton of time surfing the web for healthy, interesting gluten-free breakfasts:

1. Oatmeal

Thanks to the companies listed, I often eat a bowl of oatmeal cooked in soymilk with raisins, blueberries, flax meal, and walnuts. If you love oatmeal, too, read this poem by Green Mountain State poet, Galway Kinnell.

Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Rolled Oats and Steel Cut Oats
Lara's Gluten-Free Oats (and oat flour!)
Gifts of Nature (you can buy oat groats here)

2. Bob's Red Mill Mighty Tasty Gluten-Free Hot Cereal

At first, I saw this corn-based hot cereal as an oatmeal substitute. I cooked it in soymilk and added raisins and chopped-up apples. The taste wasn't inedible, but it wasn't inspirational either. And it wasn't oatmeal. Then last summer I noticed a grit, cheese, and jalepeno bowl on the menu of our favorite breakfast place. Hmmm. The Mighty Tasty GF Hot Cereal does have a suspiciously grit-like consistency, though it's protein and fiber content make it nutritionally superior to most grits. When I started treating it like the grits it was, I found out why it was dubbed "mighty tasty." This cereal is a great choice for a cheesy (see below), warm, savory breakfast with lots of protein and fiber.

To try, cook 1/4 c. Mighty Tasty GF Hot Cereal (or grits or Arrowsmith's Rice 'n Shine cereal--they taste the same in the end, though the rice cereal has less protein and fiber than the corn cereal) in 3/4-1 c. water for about 10 min. Put 1 ounce of chopped-up cheddar cheese in your breakfast bowl (I use Cabot 50% Reduced Fat Cheddar). When the cereal is done, pour it over the cheese and stir to melt. Add flax meal, walnuts, and salt and pepper.

2. Gluten-Free in the Greens' Multigrain Hot Cereal

When I was little and refused to eat cold cereal (drinking the milk totally grossed me out), my mom would make me a creamy, wheaty hot cereal with raisins and honey. This multigrain cereal reminds me of those winter mornings when it was so cold I'd get dressed in front of an open oven door. The beauty of this hot cereal is that you cook all the grains in one pot ahead of time, preferably on Sunday night, pop it in a Tubberware, and have hot breakfast fixings for the rest of the week. My directions assume you'll be making it ahead of time and will be eating it for about 4 days.

In one pot, pour:
1/3 c. millet
1/3 c. brown rice
1/3 c. amaranth
1/2-3/4 c. GF steel cut oats
4.5-5 c. water
(This recipe makes about four servings. To adjust the amount or types of grains, just add three times more water than grain.)

Bring to a boil and cook for 20-30 min, covered. Check it from time to time to see whether the pot needs more water. Turn off the heat, leave the lid on, and allow the grains sit for 15-20 min. and absorb any remaining water. If you're cooking this the night before, spoon the cereal into a tubberware and wait for breakfast...

To eat, add 3/4-1 c. of the cooked cereal to a pot with raisins and a little salt. Add 1 c. milk or soymilk.* Cook gently until the milk and cereal are thick. Turn off the heat, cover the pot with a lid, and let the cereal rest for a few minutes. I add frozen blueberries at this point. Pour into your breakfast bowl. Add cinnamon, cardamom, or whatever spices you like, and flax meal and walnuts.

*note: I really like the taste of cooked soymilk, though I don't like that of cooked milk. If I was using regular milk, I'd just heat the cereal in microwave and add regular milk to the already-hot cereal. Just be aware, if you decide to cook the cereal in regular milk, that it won't taste like cold milk you added to already-hot cereal.

3. Not-too-sweet Midnight Muffins

One of my quirks is that I love to spread and dip (the little pottamus and I should get along well when he hits toddlerdom), which means that ordinary muffins, meant to be eaten plain in all their sweet-fruity-nutty goodness, don't really satisfy me for breakfast.

As a result, I've tended to like toast more. Unfortunately, I've struggled to find a brand of GF bread that has a decent protein and fiber content and that doesn't contain a lot of starch. Toast is also problematic because it gets cold when you take it to a restaurant. Eating cold toast when everyone around you has warm and crunchy wholewheat makes me want to invest in a travel toaster. So my search for a whole grain bread product that I can spread peanut butter on (isn't all bread just a vehicle for peanut butter?) and that travels well to breakfast restaurants has led me back to muffins.

Enter the pottamus. He hasn't been sleeping terribly well recently, and I've found myself up in the middle of the night, pacing up and down our small downstairs. He usually doesn't buy it. He's not upset; he just doesn't want to sleep. But I've found that baking is a surefire way of getting him to sleep. I wear him in the Ergo carrier or my ring sling and go about cooking. It bores him to sleep, I guess. Either that or there's something more peaceful about the movements I make while cooking than the please-go-to-sleep-so-I-can-go-to-sleep ones I make while pacing. Regardless, I've found myself inventing muffin recipes at 3 a.m. several times recently.

Because I want something healthy for breakfast, my rule of thumbs for muffins for muffins are little or no starch, not too much fat, and not too much sugar. This recipe makes about nine muffins (a strange number, I know, but I'm the only one eating them so I don't like to make too many, in case I don't like them). I eat them split and spread with peanut butter with a touch of honey.

In a large bowl, mix:
1/4 c. corn flour
1/4 c. teff flour
1/4 c. GF oat flour (quinoa or sorghum would also work)
1/4 c. brown rice flour
1/2 tsp. xanthum gum
spices: I like 1/2 tsp. each cinnamon and cardamom
1/8 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda

In a small bowl, mix:
1/2 c. unsweetened applesauce
1 lightly beaten egg
1 tbsp. canola oil
2 tbsp. honey (if you don't want to add jam or PB to your split muffins, you might add 1-2 tbsp. more sweetener)
3/4-1 c. milk

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix. Add in 1/3 c. dried fruit (I like chopped dates). Pour into muffin tins and bake for 20-25 min. in at 350. Go put your sleeping baby to bed.

4. Japanese-Style Breakfast

a bowl of rice
a hard-boiled egg, or leftover fish from dinner
miso soup

5. In the Greens Tips for a Healthy Cold Cereal Fix

Gluten-free cold cereals aren't difficult to find: Panda Puffs, Gorilla Crunch, and Brown Rice Twists are fairly ubiquitous in natural food stores. But I didn't eat sweetened cereals before I was diagnosed, and I wasn't about to start buying the organic, GF equivalent of Frosted Flakes just to get a nice, cold crunch on a summer morning. Here are the gluten-free cold cereals I've found that have a decent amount of fiber and protein and little added sugar. I tend to mix several cereals together and often add flax meal and walnuts or almonds to boost my fiber and protein intake (and for the added crunch!).

• make your own granola or muesli
• Perky O's
• Nutty Flax
• Mesa Sunrise

New England Comfort Food….with Gluten-Free Brown Bread

Comfort food in my family is country food: biscuits, pepper-flecked milk gravy, thin-slices of salty country ham. If a snowstorm closed school, I could count on a biscuits-and-gravy breakfast before heading out to stomp out a sled track down the hill behind my house. Comfort food is warm; comfort food is soft; and as much as I love vegetables, comfort food rarely entails anything green.

Not being a native New Englander, I have to take the authors’ word for it when my cookbook mentions classic New England comfort food. But when it’s written about baked beans and bread, I’m inclined to believe them. Baked beans were church-supper staples growing up; they are definitely warm and soft, not to mention cheap and easy to prepare (with a few sliced-up hot dogs, anyone?). I didn’t grow up eating brown bread with my beans, but I read about it. For those of you who read Caddie Woodlawn as kids, remember that her Bostonian mom cooks pans of beans and steamed brown bread for Sunday dinners.

Though I’ve been making a dinner of simmered beans, sweet brown bread, and applesauce since before I stopped eating gluten, I’ve only attempted converting the bread to gluten-free twice. The first time, the result was acceptable but a little dry, so I decided to give it another whirl.

Two-thirds of the dinner was easy. I stewed a pot of navy beans (canned for a quickie dinner) in mustard, maple syrup, and gluten-free barbeque sauce (I use Annie’s). I was also inspired to make apple-quince sauce after reading Gluten-Free Bay’s quince-apple pie recipe and then actually finding quinces in my local co-op. If you haven’t tried them and you’re lucky enough to come across them in the grocery store, definitely give them a try. You do have to peel quinces and they are fairly sour, but they add new flavors to regular apple dishes and are great stewed or in jam.

The brown bread is basically a quick bread, rather than the classic brown bread that is steamed for several hours. The original recipe calls for equals parts cornmeal, rye flour, and white flour. I kept the cornmeal, replaced one part with sorghum flour (my baking flour of choice), and combined teff flour and some Pamela’s mix for the remaining part. Teff and molasses add a nice, dark color. For more moisture, I replaced some of the buttermilk in the original recipe with canned pumpkin.

The Science Teacher gave the bread three thumbs up for taste, moisture, and non-crumbliness! Give it a try on the next rainy or snowy night with your favorite baked beans recipe. It really tastes great! It’s a last-minute dinner bread—just start it baking before making the beans or the applesauce.

Gluten-Free Brown Bread (adapted from “Brown Bread” in the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites)

This recipe makes one 8.5 x 4.5 loaf pan.

½ cup cornmeal
½ cup sorghum flour
¼ cup teff flour
¼ cup GF flour mix
2 tbsp. dark brown sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
½ cup raisins
1 tsp. xanthum gum
½ tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. ginger
¼ tsp. allspice

¼ cup molasses
½ cup canned pumpkin
about ½ cup milk (any kind)

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease one 8.5 x 4.5-inch loaf pan.

Combine all of the dry ingredients, including the raisins, in a large bowl. Add the molasses, pumpkin, and milk and stir until a batter forms. You may need to add a little more milk to obtain a batter-like consistency.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 40-45 min., until the loaf is firm and pulls away from the sides of the pan. Cool the bread in the pan for 15 min. before removing from the pan and serving.

Gluten-Free Challah

As Gluten Free Bay recently mentioned, gluten-free challah represents somewhat of a Holy Grail for gluten-free Jews. There’s no obvious substitute for tearing apart and sharing bread with your friends and family, and that not-so-gentle reminder arrives each Friday at sundown when you hover for Shabbat prayers around a cutting board bearing a braided challah. The first time I had to sing the hamotzi over a rice cracker while everyone else ripped apart the bread, I cried.

And I’m not even Jewish. The Science Teacher is, though, and we have blessed candles, wine, and challah more or less every Friday since we started dating. Sometimes I would make the challah, other times we would buy buttery, sesame challahs from our favorite local bakery, Manghi’s, but regardless we always had bread to share. Even more than the flavor or feel of bread, I missed participating in a ritual I’d adopted. I never fully understood the cultural importance of breaking bread until I couldn’t do it.

For about six months after my diagnosis, I googled “gluten free challah” repeatedly, hoping that someone in the blogosphere had solved my problem already. Pretty soon I came across Sara Nussbaum’s recipe on the celiac.com forums and references to Bette Hagman’s recipe for “New Challah” in the Gluten Free Gourmet Bakes Bread, but I was reluctant to test them. Why? For starters, I was afraid of disappointment. Challah is a specific bread that I associated with a specific taste and texture. What if it tasted like starch, a flavor I loathe? What if it crumbled or wouldn’t rip apart satisfactorily? Also, neither recipe tackled the problem of the braided loaf, a characteristic I considered aesthetically, if not symbolically, critical.

But right before Passover last year—admittedly, an ironic time to be test-driving challah recipes—I decided I couldn’t face another rice cracker Shabbat. I took out Sara’s and Bette’s recipes and decided to get baking. Neither seemed exactly right, so I decided to combine them from the start. I knew I wanted to reduce the starch in the recipes I had, and I knew the challah had to be braided and rippable.

Both Bette’s and Sara’s recipes call for a large proportion of starch. One of my gluten-free baking goals is to pare down the starch in favor of whole grain flours, so I decided to use 1 part starch to 3 parts “regular” flour. Because both Bette’s and Sara’s recipes call for the same amount of liquid (I use two cups of flour which raises to fill the pan), I decided to follow Sara’s recipe for the wet ingredients. Bette’s calls for orange juice, honey, and brown sugar, which I thought might be too sweet for my taste. I used to use oil and honey in my gluten-containing challah, so I thought those ingredients might help make the flavor closer to that of the bread I used to make.

After scouring posts looking for someone who successfully braided a gluten-free challah, I only found one person who suggested piping the dough from a plastic bag with the corner cut off. As I couldn’t figure out exactly how that might work, I decided to do the next best thing: order a braided loaf pan. My version of these recipes doesn’t call for the additional egg yolk because the top of the bread bakes on the bottom of the pan, making it impossible to do the egg wash. I do spray the pan with cooking spray and sprinkle it liberally with sesame seeds.

The result? My gluten-eating father-in-law, who has definitely sampled a large range of challahs in his lifetime, declared it a success and even used some for toast on day 2. It even tastes good untoasted the next day—I actually prefer it untoasted. And the best part? You can rip it apart with your hands.

With all of the gluten-free challah experimentation happening in ovens and being blogged about, I’ll never spend another Shabbat breaking rice crackers! Here’s my recipe. I’m working on reducing the starch even more and on creating a cholesterol free version. Last night I only used two eggs with success. Let me know how it works for you…

Gluten-Free Challah

I regularly halve this recipe successfully—since I make it each Friday and only the Science Teacher and I are eating it, I don’t want tons of leftovers in the freezer—to fill half of the braided pan.

½ cup tapioca flour
½ cup sorghum flour
½ cup brown rice flour
½ cup white rice flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. yeast
1 tbsp. xanthum gum
2 tbsp. dried milk powder or almond meal

2 tbsp. potato flakes
1 cup warm water
¼ cup oil
¼ cup honey
3 eggs

cooking spray
sesame or poppy seeds

Turn the oven to 200. Spray the pan (I use a Kaiser Bakeware Laforme Braided Loaf Pan) with cooking spray and sprinkle with your seeds of choice.

Combine all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Dissolve the potato flakes in the water. Add the water/potato mixture, oil, honey, and eggs to the dry ingredients. Mix on medium for 2 minutes, until the batter looks like pudding. Transfer to the baking pan. Put the pan in the oven and turn the oven off. Let the dough rise until it reaches the top of the pan, about 30-35 min.

Turn the oven to 350 and bake for 50 min. Enjoy warm or at room temperature. Freeze leftovers, if you don’t finish the loaf within 2-3 days.