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It was the best of breads, it was the worst of breads….
Ah challah, that fluffy, rich white bread; golden braided loaves peeking out from under the covers Friday night; perfect for French toast Sunday morning. If breads were people, challah would be a Malibu surfer with hidden depth. {Scroll down this Wikipedia article on “Challah” to learn about challah’s spiritual side.}
For a long time it was considered impossible to make a gluten-free challah - rice doughs are like cake batter, too wet and runny to shape into braids.
Until I discovered Wendy Wark’s Workable Wonder Dough in Karen Robertson’s Cooking Gluten Free! I thought, if she can make a cinnamon roll, I can do a challah.
Turns out I was right in that it was fairly easy to adjust the recipe to give more of a traditional challah texture and flavor. But I was wrong in that you can’t BRAID the wonder dough. You think you can, when you do it, but as the dough rises and expands it breaks at the outside of every sharp turn, and looks awful. (I guess gluten is more elastic than xanthan gum.)
In the end, making a round spiral reminiscent of Rosh HaShana challah (thus also giving a nod to Karen’s original cinnamon roll) worked. Really well. In fact, it’s how The Sensitive Baker was born.
Of course, it wasn’t really challah challah. (Go back to that Wikipedia article - you can’t do that whole “challah” thing unless the dough is made from one of the “five grains,” namely wheat, spelt, rye, barley, or oats. And yes, we’ll talk about that list sometime. The co-inky-dink is too obvious to ignore.) Anyway, for a long time it was considered truly impossible to make a real gf-challah. Literally a contradiction in terms.
Until oats. The latest research shows that uncontaminated oats are safe for celiacs to eat. Oats are the one “crossover” grain that can be a true gluten free “challah challah.” But not a traditional braided challah, sadly - oat flour doesn’t work in the Wonder Dough.
Uncontaminated oat flour is hard to come by. Bob’s carries gf- rolled oats for oatmeal, but we have enough work around here mixing up all our flour blends - I really draw the line at grinding our own flour.
We finally sourced some gf-oat flour in Canada (I know, we’re supposed to buy local, but I don’t think oats grow in California.) We adapted the vegan loaf recipe so as to be as all-inclusive as possible - this recipe has none of the eight major allergens (wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, tree nuts, peanuts, fish, or shellfish.) And ta-da! We have an actual gf-challah.
No Malibu surfer here - this challah is solid peasant stock, one of the hidden righteous who keep the world going. It’s really good, but it ain’t pretty.
On the other hand, it is a far, far better loaf than than the vegan loaf had ever been before. (Forgive me, I couldn’t resist.) We’d never had any success making a large loaf of bread before, but the oat flour gives this bread more structure, so that we can even run a loaf through the slicer without it compressing into mushy glop. And it stays fresher longer, even out of the freezer.
We still have further testing to do (for one thing, we’re trying to make it a little more attractive) but this bread is a real winner.
More of a winner, in the end, than the original “mock” challah-roll. By this time we had had no end of problems with the first “challah” recipe, the one based on the Wonder Dough. That one gets its structure from copious amounts of xanthan gum. Xanthan is what makes gluten-free baking happen but it doesn’t know when to stop, so the rolls were always hard as a rock the next day. Even in the freezer they didn’t keep so well.
We tried selling frozen unbaked rolls, so that people could get them fresh out of the oven, but people didn’t relish the idea of defrosting them, letting them rise, and baking them. [I don't know about you, but that seems like a lot of work after I've already shlepped to the bakery to BUY the challah rolls! And you STILL had to eat them by the next day!]
I held on to the bread for sentimental reasons — after all, it was our first product! — and because sometimes people really need something that looks like traditional challah. But as the bakery got busier, it became impossible to justify making it every week; 48 mediocre challah rolls at exorbitant prices (because of all the labor they took) when we could be doing twice as many bagels.
But then it dawned on me. A bread that tastes like challah should be easily adaptable to become a brioche. Brioche, not being a shaped bread but just a blob of dough baked in a shaped pan, would not require such huge amounts of xanthan gum, so it would handle better and not be as expensive to make.
And it was true! It’s like the challah-wannabe gave up the pretense and went back home to the south of France, where it blossomed. This may be the best gluten-free bread I have ever tasted.
(Though I will always prefer my pastrami on crusty rolls.)
March 5th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Couldn’t stop reading this page, the presentation is super. The bread photos are “delicious”.
Some of your readers may enjoy our nutrition pages at http://spencek-vitaminsnutrition.blogspot.com
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:05 am
Thanks! I just want to be clear that the photo of the “challah” - the first one, the beautiful one — is NOT OURS!! I don’t think anyone in the world knows how to make something that looks like that, gluten-free. It’s the Holy Grail of gluten-free bread baking.