slow rise in bread machine / musings
New sana bread machine procured, has a stainless pan.
I've been working on gluten-free recipes and they're coming along well, need to tweak them for the machine though. Using buckwheat, sorghum, white rice flour, brown rice flour, arrowroot, potato starch, xanthan, instant yeast, salt, above in different combinations. The machine is already proving useful as I'm sometimes too lazy to go through all the steps conventionally and now just dumping things will make food. On the first run it seems like I need a bit less water than in a conventional oven.
On the subject at hand: I was thinking about gluten flour rise times, but this could also apply to gluten free.
Is there something in between sourdough and yeast risen bread? The sana machine can combine two 5-hour rise times for a total of 10 hours. I'm wondering if I could do something like no heat/room temp and use only 1/8 teaspoon of yeast or thereabouts and do a long ferment, something like 5-10 hours. Would I be anywhere in the realm of sourdough or is it a dumb idea? Fake sourdough?
You'll need a week or two to get a sourdough starter going, typically, and it is a combination of bacteria and wild yeasts.
What you propose is effectively a delayed or retarded fermentation, using commercial yeast. It does wonderful things for flavor in wheat and rye breads. With some experimentation, you can find out how the gluten free flours respond to the treatment. My concern, which is based on my very limited experience with gluten-free baking, is whether or not the gelling agent you use (guar, xanthan, psyllium, flaxseed, etc.) will stand up to the extended times for the slow fermentation you envision. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Do let us know what your experimentation yields.
Paul
A breadmaker can be manipulated for sourdough as long as you find the right starter % and programme. Even though I don't have a breadmaker my friend and I worked out a formula for sourdough. It works with the Panasonic on the French Bread programme and if yours has a similar setting then it's worth a try. The formula is here...
Formula for sourdough in a breadmaker
If I'm using the artisan in 5 minutes a day method of refigerated slow rise yeast dough, I wonder if there is any advantage to using the bread machine for that. Probably not, other than maybe no long preheat for the oven.
update
It took a few tries to get a good gluten free bread out of the breadmaker. The first one I did turned out well by accident. I have no clue what I did. The next 6 were terrible, gummy and sunken.
Finally I got a pretty good consistent and easy formula:
1.5 cups white rice flour
1.5 cups starch (arrowroot)
1.5 cups wholegrain flour, sorghum for now or brown rice
2 teaspoons salt
2.5-3 cups water
2 scant teaspoons xanthan/guar mix (might be optional)
2 teaspoons instant yeast
combine flours and powders except for yeast and mix well.
then follow the usual procedures for bread machine baking, water on the bottom. I'm using a 9 minute knead time, and adding in yeast at about 7 minutes in. The sana has little glass covers for the baking pan so I use those for the rise and take them off right at bake time or a little bit into the bake.
bake 1 hour at 180c
I think the problem was I was over-rising before, but can't really be too sure. There must be a lot of spring because visually it never looks really risen when bake starts, but it's been turning out really good.
All in all it was a good purchase and good time-saver. It's nice not to have to transfer goopy gf wet mix into another bowl. The artisan method of baking in a closed preheated pan turns out better loaves, but not that much better.
A lot of the recipes on the web are just wack, adding in all sorts of non-essential things like flax, psyllium, milk, eggs. This bread tastes real close to a half whole grain gluten bread, especially with the liberal salt.
I tried amaranth and quinoa, one of them was too bitter so for now it's going to be brown rice or sorghum. I think buckwheat will work well as the whole grain too. You can get sorghum flour cheap at indian stores if there is one in your area, and it tastes better than the stuff you get at health food stores.