Bread v2 - With Oatmeal Flour

The recipe we've been using was giving us some very dense bread whether we used the bread maker or the oven. So after much googling and weeding through numerous gluten-free sites, I found a recipe and modified it.

1 1/2 C rolled oats flour
1 1/2 C rice flour (brown or white or both)
1/2 C potato starch flour
1 Tbsp active dry yeast
1 Tbsp xanthan gum
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/4 C warm water
1/4 C oil 1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 eggs
2 Tbsp honey or agave nectar

I've made it both in the bread maker and in the oven. They both turned out fantastic. For the oven, prepare the yeast by combining the yeast, honey, and water. Then let it sit for 10 minutes. Whisk eggs, oil, lemon juice and vinegar. Mix dry ingredients in mixer. When the yeast is ready, mix the egg and oil into the dry ingredients and then the yeast. Put dough into a 9" greased pan. Let it rise for an hour (cover with saran wrap for first 20-30 minutes until bread touches covering). Then bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes. When using the bread maker, use yeast that is made for bread machines. Because of the second cycle on most bread machines (including ours), the bread was more dense than with the oven method.

We finally have a recipe for moist, fluffy, delicious bread that the kids love! And it's gluten- and dairy-free. We made the oatmeal and rice flours using our Vitamix dry blender.  I think we bought the potato flour starch from Whole Foods. We'll have to find something else when it runs out, maybe just more rice flour. Next time I'm going to try it without the xanthan gum since a friend's mom is allergic to it and to guar gum. Rolled oats are naturally gluten-free but often get contaminated with wheat, so make sure the oats are certified gluten-free.

Update, January 19, 2016:
Since posting this recipe, I've changed it slightly.  Since most of the flours I use are heavier than conventional wheat flour, our bread was very dense and wasn't rising as much.  And since we don't have a scale to weigh the flour, reducing it to three total cups really helped.  And instead of using just the two types of flour and potato starch, I use whatever flour we have on hand.  For instance, the last time, I used 1 C rice flour, 1 C buckwheat flour, 1/2 C oatmeal flour, 1/4 C corn flour, and 1/4 C flax meal.  Sometimes I'll use some potato flour (dry shredded potatoes using a dehydrator and then the Vitamix to grind it into flour), almond meal (also made using our Vitamix).  Next I'd like to try some quinoa flour.

Muffins

A friend from our Church family recently gave us a juicer. It's not top-of-the-line or anything but does a pretty good job. Ever since we got our Vitamix blender, we've wanted to add a nice juicer to our already-crowded counter, so this was great. We were surprised by how much pulp resulted from just a couple cups of juice. So just like anything else, we googled it and found a few recipes and other suggestions to use the pulp. The muffins have been a huge hit. Here's the recipe that I modified from one I found on justjuice.org:

• 2 C flour (we used rice flour)
• 1/4 C flax meal
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 C applesauce
• 1 C pulp (or more)
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 C oil
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp sweetener (we used agave nectar)

Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes I'll add a little cinnamon, a banana, or whatever sounds good. We ran out of flax meal and liked them just the same without it.

Conlan loves the muffins so much that we have to hide them so he doesn't eat them all. And now we have a way to sneak even more vegetables and fruits into his diet.

 

I told Gavin he probably wouldn't like the muffin mix, but he still wanted it and liked it even.