I have wanted to join the sourdough crowd for ages. Unfortunately, as anyone who is gluten free knows, the trial and error of finding an edible recipe can take a lot of time and result in a lot of expensive ingredients turning into inedible bricks.
When I first started looking up gluten free sourdough recipes, a lot of them were suspiciously easy… “Just do the exact same thing you would do with wheat flour, but substitute gf flour instead!” type easy.
I have a few recipes like that. They are fine. Realistically the edible ones are all flat-ish things like cookies though. You don’t get really good gluten free bread by following wheat flour tutorials though. Gluten is literally what gives bread it’s structure, and if you aren’t accounting for that, it’s not going to be great.
Instead I found a fantastic tutorial over on YouTube that worked beautifully for me. She really experimented with different flours and talks about why she does each step that specific way. She also suggests where you can and can’t vary ingredients a bit. The channel is called The Ranchers Homestead, and I will link the videos below so that you can follow along yourselves. There is one for making your starter in the first place, and then one for the bread.
The starter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqbzgWBP7ck&ab_channel=TheRanchersHomestead
The bread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwkINNtWC8Q&ab_channel=TheRanchersHomestead
The only thing I do differently, is that I don’t shape my dough on the counter. My dough comes out just a little bit stickier than hers, so handling it more doesn’t improve the shape. Instead I put a piece of parchment paper in the bowl it rises in, before adding the dough. Then I transfer the parchment straight to the hot pan when it is time to go in the oven.
It is so lovely to have bread that just… works. It even tastes good! Do you have any idea how long it has been since I had eaten warm bread with butter? I’m in love.
It’s even approved by my gluten free kiddo. Having gone gf only a few years ago, their standards haven’t lowered as far as mine have, so you know it actually tastes alright.
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