The Citadel

I use a bread machine, a Rojirushi brand machine which I love.

I bake for us and for friends and neighbors. They enjoy the bread, we enjoy their smiles (and the delicious aroma of freshly baked bread).

The current obsession is a pre-ferment method which involves mixing all the water with just some of the flour, all of the yeast (and I add gluten at this stage). Mixed in the machine, this creates a bubbling slurry after about 2 hours, then I add the rest of the flour and set the machine to its "European" cycle.

Here's what it looks like when I start adding the remaining flour: -
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When that's mixed in it looks like this: -
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Then it "rises" and is "punched down" a few times, the machine does all of this and after baking, looks like this: -
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I could use an amazing gluten-free recipe.

Danoff wrote: Wed Oct 08, 2025 7:29 pm I could use an amazing gluten-free recipe.

I'm sorry, I have absolutely zero experience with baking gluten free bread, and even without the added gluten in the above recipe, there's a problem. Gluten-free bread leaves out wheat, rye, and barley - the usual gluten sources - so it relies on a blend of alternative flours, starches, and binders to mimic the structure and elasticity gluten provides. All my baking uses wheat flours.

My main source of bread recipes is a book of maybe 500 pages with only 9 devoted to gluten-free baking.

Given that I have found ChatGPT to be a very good cooking advisor overall, you might want to send it out to find the best recipes and to provide you with an education in the fine arts of gluten free baking. I have used it a lot, including to gain an understanding of what's going on in the recipe above, and what would happen if I chose to tweak my recipe. When things go pear-shaped, it's great at diagnosing the issues.

My wife and I's experience with baking our own bread was very short lived. We loved everything about it (smell, taste etc.) but we accidentally threw out the mixing blade that was embedded in a loaf that we'd failed to use completely . After an exhausting search that covered everything from the manufacturer to second hand markets, Gumtree, Amazon, eBay etc for a replacement part we finally gave up and binned the whole machine to make some extra space when we had our kitchen renovated... so that was the end of that

Maybe one day we'll try again.

I think we have a similar machine at home; we made a blueberry bread this last week.

We probably use it about 4-5 times a year.

I'm in the process of slightly altering the kitchen setup so that I can get myself an oven large enough for baking 3 breads at a time, because the supermarket bread sucks once you've tried proper bread but proper bread is also silly expensive. A large oven and the ingredients will be paid for in less than 6 months of home cooking.