Gluten Free Friday, Day 4

If you missed last Friday, check out my post on cooking from scratch here.

Today I'm going to discuss a big money saver for me: Baking from Scratch.

I used to buy Ener-G Foods Light Tapioca Loaf. While it's sort of tasty (when toasted), it's quite spendy. My Hy-Vee sold it for $3.99, and I could eat through at least one a week. After a year, I decided it was time for a change. I now make my own bread in the Breadman TR875, which has a gluten free setting. It's much cheaper, and I actually like it quite a bit better. Here's the bread recipe that I use.

Baking gluten free can be a challenge, though. It requires a lot of different ingredients. I haven't branched out into the various beans flours yet; I mostly use rice flour, tapioca flour, potato starch, and quinoa flour. Xanthan gum adds the stickiness that the gluten free flours need. It's a necessity, but quite expensive. Luckily recipes call for it in small amounts.

Making bread taking a while since there are so many ingredients. I've found that measuring out two sets of the dry ingredients (one for using right away and one for storing for later) really is a time saver. Also, I usually remove my dough from the bread machine and have it rise on the stove. Then I just bake it in the oven in a regular loaf pan. Otherwise, the loaf ends up being pretty small and has a hole in the middle from the kneading paddle.

I've set up my kitchen to facilitate ease of access to all of my ingredients. I've found that I'm much more motivated to bake when I can get to everything I need with reasonable speed. If I know I'll have to dig in my cupboards for hours just to get all the stuff out, I'm not going to do it.

(My baking drawer)

I haven't done much baking experimentation yet; I usually just follow the recipe. I hope to one day branch out and try things on my own. When I do, I'll be sure to share the (good) recipes with you!