Over the last 15 years I have really gotten into cooking and baking. Hence this blog;) Unfortunately, I had to change my diet a couple years ago due to some health issues. For almost 2 years now I have been following the FODMAP diet – some days more strictly than others. This diet was a life saver for me, and I’ve learned a lot about digestion. I’ve also learned a lot about foods that my body doesn’t digest well, and can now avoid them instead of being sick all the time. If any of this speaks to you, I would recommend picking up IBS: Free at Last by Patsy Catsos. I would credit her for fixing/healing my gut when the doctors threw up their hands and said it was all in my head. Okay, in all fairness, first they took out my gall bladder – but that only worked for a few months.

So hooray for me, not only was I able to eat without getting sick – I was losing weight. But it’s really not as glamorous as it sounds. Yes, I was dropping clothing sizes and bra sizes – but a lot of it was due to giving up wheat, lactose, sugar, caffeine, salsa, most fruits, lots of veggies, and legumes…to name a few. If you still think it sounds glamorous, then consider Friday night pizza. Or anytime a pizza presents itself into your life. Think about the chewy gluten-filled, doughy crust; and the gooey, stretchy cheese; and the spicy, tangy sauce.There isn’t a whole lot about pizza that jives with the FODMAP diet. Good thing I love a challenge!

I found work-arounds to just about every favorite recipe in my life – except pizza crust. Finding a GOOD gluten-free (not that I have problem with gluten, but it’s the easiest way to know something is “wheat free”) pizza crust is pretty damned impossible. Truly. I have tried all the store-bought crusts AND mixes. I have tried everything the frozen gluten-free pizza world has to offer. And from that research I can share that if you want to spend a cool $60, you can get Amazon to ship you about a dozen frozen pizza crusts from the Smart Flour company. They also sell their ready-made frozen pizzas at Fred Meyer. Pretty good in a pinch. Still, I missed tossing my pizza dough – the ritual of making my Friday night pizza. I missed the smell and flavor and texture.

And then it all changed. Pinterest FODMAP recipes were becoming increasingly common for me, and I discovered the Gluten Free on a Shoestring blog, by Nicole Hunn. She was advertising some bread recipes as her new Gluten Free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread cookbook was coming out. Her recipe for gluten-free Sweet Hawaiian Rolls was on Pinterest and I tried it. Because, who doesn’t like sweet Hawaiian rolls? First, being able to make a bread dough – A REAL BREAD DOUGH – one that is soft, smooth, and elastic, and feels alive in your hands. The smell of this dough…and the way my house smelled when the rolls were baking. Tears in my eyes, people. I have always been a self-proclaimed bread girl. I love my bread. I grew up on quality sourdough from the local French bakery. If bread was my life, being from the Bay Area made sourdough my religion.

Enter Hunn’s book, and the chapter on “wild yeast” breads, starting with sourdough. And since I had two weeks off, and making TRUE sourdough bread is a sort of culinary bucket list item of mine, I threw caution to the wind and went for it. I trust this cookbook, and follow it to the letter. Yes, Nicole, there is flour and butter stains on the pages, and I have sticky notes and bookmarks flagging pages. In fact, with the amount of baking I have been doing in the past few months, I would like to nominate Ms Hunn for the Nobel Prize in Gluten Free Baking. She is the real deal, and did ALL the research and trial and error for us – so all we have to do is follow her recipes. 

One thing I have learned is that gluten free bread doesn’t freeze well – and you lose texture and flavor. To solve this, when I make a dough (bread, cookie, pastry, etc) I only bake-off what I am going to eat in the next couple days. The rest of the dough goes into the freezer. So far (knock on wood) this has been working; I just switch the dough from freezer to fridge a day or two before I want to bake it, and it’s ready to go. Most of the recipes call for working with chilled or cold dough anyway.

So here we go! The Sourdough Bread Adventure!!

The first step was to make the wild yeast starter. This involved mixing sorghum flour, teff flour and water in various amounts, over 4 days. This picture represents a volume of about 1c of liquid yeast slurry, however it has risen to the 3c marker on these mason jars. CRAZY!! 

Here’s the deal with gluten-free baking, and Hunn’s cookbook in general. Weighing and mixing flour becomes your life. At first the idea of weighing ingredients went against the nature of my Western culture -- but you get the hang of it. And it eventually becomes second-nature and goes pretty fast.

This is late on Day 4, when the liquid yeast slurry became more of a dough. Again, more mixing of flour. I’m not sure I would do this again - as it involved a lot of waste. Part of getting to this point means discarding most of the liquid slurry each day, as you add more fresh flour and water.

This was Day 7, as the yeast starter and Mother Dough have to also sit and rise for a while. All in all, I started this project on a Tuesday and finally ate the bread the following Monday. I did this during the week between Christmas and New Years, and let me tell you - you don’t want to get stuck running to town for more Whey Protein Isolate on New Years Day. After a snow storm. This proved to be a pipe dream, and after 3 grocery stores we went home with Whey Protein Powder. Best we could do on a national holiday, in a town where we are lucky to have gluten-free sections in the aisles. But I had to move on to the next step. Not really - but I had already been patient for a week. I wanted to eat my bread!! So I researched the difference between Whey Protein Powder and Whey Protein Isolate. Coincidentally, Catsos’ book on the Fodmap Diet lists the isolate as “allowable” while the protein powder is “not allowed.” Turns out this is because the powder is loaded with lactose and some other stuff, and the isolate is mostly just whey protein. Next, I re-read the part in Hunn’s book about why she uses the Whey Protein Isolate, and it turns out she found it to be the best substitute for gluten. Typical gluten-free breads have that gummy thing going on because of all the “gum protein” that is taking place of the gluten protein. In the end, for 75 grams of Whey Protein Isolate, I subbed 70g of the Whey Protein Powder, and 5g of Xanthan Gum to increase the protein content. I consider myself an “advanced gluten free baker” for doing this. It worked!

Or, at least, my bread wasn’t ruined;)