Low-gluten / Gluten-free oatmeal molasses bread for bread machines

The prices for those mini-loaves of gluten-free bread always shock me, and the flavor always underwhelms me. These two factors got me looking for alternatives that I could make myself. Here’s an option from AllRecipes.com, which I have since experimented with and improved upon. This oatmeal bread recipe is one such outcome.

Description: Delicious oatmeal bread with dramatically less gluten (or no gluten at all) that takes 15 minutes to prepare in a bread maker. This recipe has about 1/6 the gluten of regular bread, or you can choose to eliminate gluten completely. I’m not allergic to gluten and I love the flavor of glutenlicious bread, but I find that lowering gluten helps me maintain energy throughout the day. So, I keep some regular flour in my recipes, albeit much less, to maintain the bready flavor and physical properties of gluten. I find that this recipe can taste as good as “regular” oatmeal bread, which is pretty darn hard to say for most other gluten-free breads.

Servings: One loaf

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 1 Tbs cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/8 cup molasses
• 1/8 cup agave nectar or honey
• 1 1/2 cups butter milk, warmed (not too hot to kill yeast)
• 1 C brown rice flour
• 1/2 C tapioca flour
• 1/2 C bakers flour (for gluten free, substitute this with more tapioca flour)
• 1/2 C oatmeal flour
• 5/6 C oatmeal (1/2 C + 1/3 C)
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp xantham gum
• 1 Tbs active dry yeast

Directions:

1. Combine all the wet stuff in the bread machine.
2. Add all the dry stuff to the liquids. You want the flours to add up to 2+1/3 cups. I like to experiment with different ratios.
3. On your bread machine choose a bread course that doesn’t punch down the dough after the 2nd rise period. (On many bread machines, the “rapid” courses eliminate the final punch. On my machine, the Rapid Whole Wheat course is the one.)
4. 5 minutes after the machine starts mixing, check the consistency. The consistency will be like batter; it will not form a ball like regular bread dough, but it also shouldn’t be too liquidy. Add rice flour or liquid to adjust, as necessary.
5. After the mixing cycles have finished, sprinkle oatmeal on top of the batter.
6. When bread is finished, remove pan from the machine and allow 30 minutes to cool. (The bread bottom sticks to the pan and peels off if you remove too quickly.)

Let me know how it works for you.

PS- I am officially in love with oat flour, which is appropriate for this oatmeal bread, but also useful across the board as a gluten-free substitute for wheat flour. Here’s a good article I found on oat flour.