Gluten-Free Bread: Millet Oatmeal

Gluten Free Bread!

Here’s one of my favorite gluten-free breads that is great to make with a bread machine. The original inspiration for this recipe was one developed by Gluten Free Mommy, but it has been modified quite a bit since.

My number one favorite fact about millet is that you can pop it like popcorn. It’s a little funny because that’s one of the things that I think millet tastes like: corn. That description is a little simplistic, though. It’s like if you were to combine the flavors of a short-grain rice and corn half and half, you might end up with something that tastes like millet. Millet is a good source of protein. It can be substituted for rice and corn in a number of contexts. It makes a good substitute for polenta in most recipes, and can be cooked up and served like you would cream of wheat.

The other important ingredient in this bread is molasses. Molasses is a by-product of manufacturing sugar from sugar cane or beets. Strangely enough, black strap molasses is still mostly sugar. It’s also a great source of iron, magnesium, calcium, and potassium. And it has that crazy molasses flavor. That’s what we’re really looking for here.

Our recipe also calls for gluten-free oat flour. You can get this from various places. Bob’s Red Mill has gluten free oats and you can grind them up into flour. Oat flour, as you might expect, makes bread more hearty, and also seems to add a very subtle sweetness to the dough. It also makes the finished product a little more fluffy. I think maybe that’s because of the fiber in it? I really like trying out oat flour in my recipes.

And now, without further ado, the recipe: Gluten Free Millet Oatmeal Bread

1 cup brown rice flour
3/4 cup + 2 Tbps tapioca flour
3/4 cup millet flour
1/2 cup gluten free oat flour
1/3 cup arrowroot starch
1/4 flax seed meal
1/4 cup plus 1 cup water
1 1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
4 Tbsp canola oil
3 Tbsp date sugar or equivalent
2 Tbsp whole flax seeds
2 Tbsp whole millet
1 Tbsp xanthan gum
1 Tbsp molasses
1 packet active dry yeast

(You can substitute quinoa flour for the oat flour. Corn starch can be used instead of arrowroot.) Don’t forget that you’re going to want to get all the ingredients to room temperature before starting. So it’s a good idea to pull the eggs out the the refrigerator well beforehand. Also you’ll want to heat up the water to at least room temperature. If you have a thermometer, the temperature should ideally be 110 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Put it all in the bread machine following the directions of your breadmaker’s manufacturer. For our bread machine, we put the liquids in first, and then the dry ingredients second (of course, you’ll want to mix up the dry ingredients before putting them in the bread machine). After that, we put the yeast in a divot on the very top of the mound formed by the dry ingredients. The consistency of the batter is important. This bread should be about the consistency of cake batter when it’s been mixed. Don’t put too much water in, though, because then the loaf will fall halfway through baking. When we program our bread machine for this, we have a program that we use for gluten-free bread. If you have a bread machine that has a gluten-free setting, then use that. Otherwise, you’ll want to program your machine to only mix and knead once before baking. There isn’t gluten in the bread, so there isn’t a reason to knead it a lot, and in fact, bakers find that gluten-free bread is better without kneading it so much. So you don’t want it to punch down the dough. Just mix, knead, rise, and bake!

This really is the best bread. It has character and heartiness without having strange beany flavors that some homemade gluten-free breads can have. It’s an ideal sandwich bread. The one problem with this bread is that the crust tends to singe a little when it’s toasted, so be careful with the toaster! That’s it. Thanks for reading another one of my posts here on gluten free bread machine.

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Make Jam in your Bread Machine

Plums for Making JamOne thing we’ve talked about already on this blog is that you can make jam with your bread machine. This is especially awesome if you have some kind of fruit tree or bush in your back yard. I don’t know about you, but we have a lot of trouble eating all the fruit that our tree makes. So for example, if you have a cherry tree you could make some cherry jelly. Mmmmmmm. I love cherries. For this tutorial, I got some plums from a tree in our back yard and used our bread machine to make jam with the plums.

The IngredientsThe ingredients are pretty simple. Besides the plums, you will need lemon juice, water, the pectin, and sugar. I like to use Pomona’s Universal Pectin. The reason for this is that you can make jam without a ton of sugar. Other fruit pectins require that you add tons of sugar so that the jam will gel up and get thick. Pomona’s is activated with calcium. The calcium comes in the package with the pectin so you can add the right amount to the bread machine when you’re making it.

I used plums but here is a list of other kinds of fruit you can make jam, jelly, and marmalade out of: strawberry, raspberry, kiwi fruit, gooseberry, blueberry, pineapple, cherry, currant, apricot, peach, blackberry, oranges, mandarin oranges, apples, blackberries, grapes, peppers, or even prickly pears. Most bread machines will make jam.

Plum Jam – Made With Bread Machine

Makes two and a half cups of jam.

  • 2 cup plums – cut up and mashed (~16 smallish plums)
  • 1/2 cup sugar or equivalent sweetener
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 1 1/2 tsp pectin powder
  • 2 tsp calcium water (mixed per instructions that come with the Pomona’s package.)
  1. Slice the fruit up into 1/2 cubes and mash. If desired, you can soften them up by cooking a little.
  2. Stir lemon juice and calcium water into plum mixture.
  3. In separate dish, mix sugar and pectin.
  4. Dial up the jam setting on your breadmaker, add the plum and pectin mixtures. Press start.

Depending on your bread machine, cooking should take about an hour and a quarter. Figure 20 minutes for preparing the ingredients.

Bread Machine Jam

Here’s the finished product on some gluten-free bread. I really love this jam. It kind of tastes like cherries, actually, which sort of makes sense considering that cherries and plums are pretty closely related. I really love making jam and when I do, a little extra fun is to actually use some canning jars to can some up. Something else that’s really cool is that you know what’s in your jam when you eat it. There isn’t some kind of ingredient that sounds like it belongs in a chemistry set instead of your jelly.

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Gluten Free Bread Machine First Post

This is the first post on Gluten-Free Bread Machine dot com. I’m going to go on and on about why it’s really great to have a bread machine, and especially what’s awesome about it if you’re being gluten-free. It doesn’t matter really, how sensitive you are. So far, the best GF bread I’ve had was the bread I make in my own breadmaker. Store-bought gluten-free bread is usually too dense and/or too dry. Or it’s that nasty rice bread. There are the breads in the refrigerated section that are a little better, but they tend to be stunted little excuses for bread. Nasty. I actually like the Trader Joe’s rice bread, but seeing as how I can bake better bread at home, it doesn’t make any sense to buy it. Here’s some more about the subject:

Love Fresh Bread? Get a Bread Machine – Ah! Who doesn’t love fresh bread? I do. You would have to be crazy not to love cutting a slice off a freshly baked loaf of bread and spreading some butter or honey on it. That’s what it’s all about. It still has that fresh-baked bread smell and flavor. Nobody wants to bake bread every day (unless they do it for a living) but using a bread machine makes it a snap to bake bread every week. For an extra-luxurious option, you can set a timer on many breadmachines that will make it start in the early morning. That way you can have bread waiting when you get up for breakfast.

Baking Bread is Easy – I used to bake my bread by hand. It’s fun to knead dough and let it rise and all that. But until you get a routine down, it can be a pain. For one thing, kneading can be problematic. You don’t want to do it too little or too much. Also, it can be hard to make sure your bread is rising at the right temperature. Sometimes things just don’t work out and there are so many variables involved, it can be impossible to know what went wrong. Breadmakers take a lot of the guesswork out of the process. As long as you can measure your ingredients accurately, you’re pretty much set.

You Control Your Ingredients – The are a lot of manufacturers getting into the gluten-free game. Unfortunately, a lot of them are using shared equipment, and there’s no way of knowing how well they are cleaning their equipment, unless they are batch-testing their products. So you get cross-contamination. When you make your own bread, you control what you put in your bread machine, and how clean it gets in between when you bake. In addition, you can make recipes that are far more nutritious than rice bread!

Bread Machines Control Temperature - If you’re baking bread in winter, it can be hard to find a place in your kitchen to let your bread rise. I used to have a gas stove, and the pilots there would keep things warm enough. Now I don’t have that anymore, and my oven can’t be programmed to keep a temperature that is low enough to make bread rise. Bread machines keep the dough at the right temperature for the right time, so you don’t have to worry about that. In addition to that, many bread machines will also bring your ingredients to the right temperature even before mixing everything up.

One Advantage of a Programmable Breadmaker – A lot of bread machines aren’t very programmable. Some have different courses that you can use to vary certain factors. If you’re going to be making gluten-free bread, you need to at least be able to control the amount of kneading that happens. The reason for this is that kneading bread is all about getting the gluten going. Since there isn’t gluten in GF bread, then you don’t want to knead it much.

Bake Healthier Bread – Yes. Yes. Read the ingredients on that loaf of rice bread and you will find that it is mostly potato starch, tapioca starch, and/or rice flour. It’s not exactly bad for you, but compared to wheat, it’s not good for you either. There are a ton of great gluten-free bread recipes available on the Internet. You can make your own bread with millet, buckwheat, teff, quinoa, and bean flours. My current favorite bread uses a lot of millet and is flavored with a little molasses. It’s awesome and much more healthy.

Bread Machines are Fun – Besides making bread, a lot of breadmakers are good for things like making jam. They’re also good at producing dough to make pasta or pizzas. They’re also a lot of fun just for making bread. They take a lot of the drudgery and worry out of it. I like making a loaf of bread by hand here and there, but at the same time, it’s not something I want to do every week. I just don’t have that kind of time. Instead of doing all the drudge work, you get to do the fun things, like adding sunflower or pumpkin seeds to a recipe just to see how they go.

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