After 2 months hanging out for gluten-free Easter bread, Noodle Cook celebrates with a successful high protein LSA white French style bread for lunch. Shown here is a beautiful moist, fluffy and flexible sandwich. This is incredible for a bread made without GFG, xanthan, guar gum or any other potential allergens with foodcodes. The bread stays fresh for 2 whole days with acceptable eating quality for close on 4 days.
The celebration proves premature as there is one slight problem. Like all gluten-free bread, including commercial ones, this type of bread often stales rapidly. The main effect is rapid drying out of the starches (syneresis), leaving a dry mouth feel. The other effect is crumbling when the texture of starches changes on cooling (retrogradation), such as freezing to extend shelf life. The crumbling occurs when frozen bread is defrosted, but is easily reversed by toasting, or reheating in a microwave oven.
The moistness of the bread is achieved using the starch gel method of bread making, also known as "tangzhong" in Chinese wheat bread making. Through gelatinization of a small portion of the total flour, the starches swell to absorb more moisture.
For gluten-free bread doughs (batters), the gelatinization enables 2 things:
- develops the stretch, particularly of the amylopectin starch component, to simulate the gluten of wheat flour
- thickens the starches to suspend the flour particles, especially whole grain gluten-free flours and nutritious seed and nut meals
Starch gels to achieve the above are sensitive to gelatinization temperature and viscosity. The viscosity is dependent on starch type, and starch to water ratio. "Tangzhong" employs gelatinization of wheat starch at
65 deg C, of 1 part flour to 5 parts water using around 5% of flour weight.
The starch gel under development here relies on potato starch to replace the characteristics of gluten. The temperature range for gelatinization is 60-90 deg C. Fermentation is at room temperature to maintain the consistency of the starch gel. There is still a lot of hit and miss as to what proportion of flour to gelatinize and the right gel viscosity to create the desire bread texture. Regardless of the imperfection of the technique, all the gluten-free breads made using the potato starch gel turn out, as pictured, light, airy, fluffy, moist, and flexible.
Retrogradation is harder to control. Research shows that SWEET potato starch retrogrades less. Unfortunately introducing sweet potato starch slows the retrogradation but not prevent the effect as the bread ages in the freezer. The defrosted bread after 7-day freeze shows sign of staling at lunch time, 4 hours after successful thawing to freshness as when first baked. After more research, it seems to stabilize sweet potato starch, you need
polysaccharide gum like guar gum or xanthan!
It seems that the quest to replace guar gum and xanthan has gone in a circle. However, the starch gel is still the answer to those dense cake-like gluten-free breads. There's nothing wrong with baking every 3 days to enjoy that beautiful fluffy bread that sceptics say is impossible for gluten-free flours.
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