Gluten Free Chickpea Sandwich Bread

Bread. The staff of life. The stuff of my celiac husband's dreams. Ironically, while the rest of our non-gluten-free family thinks bread is just okay, Dan must have something bready to complete his dining experience. A plate of pasta is not a whole meal if there is no roll to swab up the last luscious bits of sauce, breakfast isn't right without a couple of slices of toast on the side and breadstuffs are one of the holy trinity of the dinner hour.

Blame it on his Irish-Polish ancestry, and while we're at it, we can attribute the celiac gene to the paternal side of his family as well, though they were just known for their "sensitive stomachs" in the days before celiac disease was being diagnosed by the medical community.

So he and I bake a lot of gluten-free bread, buns and rolls and keep them, sliced and wrapped in the freezer for quick thawing for his meals. Dan prefers having buns and rolls around to slices of bread, so we've come up with some ways to get the soft, sticky, slidy gluten-free doughs (like using greased metal egg rings that restaurants use when they want eggs to stay in a perfect circle shape on the griddle) to stay in their bun shapes with some success. You can check out more GF bun baking tips at this post from the Crispy Cook archives and then pretty much adapt any gluten-free bread recipe into GF buns.

The recipe we use over and over again for sandwiches and for toast is Elizabeth Barbone's Sandwich Bread recipe from her cookbook "Easy Gluten-Free Baking". It makes a great basic white bread recipe that toasts beautifully and doesn't crumble easily.

With the encouragement of the Gluten Free Ratio Rally bakers, a group of gluten free food bloggers that tackles a different baking project each month and deconstructs/reconstructs them measuring ingredients by weight and recipes by ratios of flour/liquid/fat/egg, I was looking to make a different kind of sandwich bread to add variety to the freezer stash. This month's GF Ratio Rally Host, Karen of the Cooking Gluten-Free blog, picked BREAD as our baking challenge and initially I thought about trying to make a crusty, artisan-style loaf. I just ran out of time and schedule during this busy past month (note dearth of Crispy Cook posts) with various kid, business and garden activities on my plate, so I will hopefully be copying down someone else's recipe for such a gluten-free delight when Karen rounds up all the Ratio Rally posts on June 6th.

For my contribution to this bread rally, I wanted to use chickpea flour as my base flour. I find big bags of chickpea flour (labeled besan) at the Indian markets in Albany and they are economically priced. We use chickpea flour (and our other staple gluten free flour, brown rice flour) in lots of savory dishes to thicken sauces and curries, bread fish and veggies for pan drying and in one of our favorite meals, Bhajis with Rice. Chickpea flour also adds a nice bit of protein and fiber to our cooking, so that's a great bonus. My stab at converting a basic white bread recipe into a chickpea loaf was encouragingly successful. '

Here's what I did:

Chickpea Sandwich Bread

3 Tbsp. brown sugar
4 oz. warm water
1 Tbsp. active dry yeast

8 oz. chickpea flour (also known as besan or garbanzo bean flour)
4 oz. cornstarch
4 oz. white rice flour
8 oz. tapioca flour
3 tsp. xanthan gum
1-1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. granulated garlic (can use garlic powder)
1 tsp. dried basil

3 eggs, beaten
4 oz. warm water
3 Tbsp. vegetable oil

Vegetable shortening

Grease a 9x5 loaf pan and set aside.

Mix brown sugar, 4 oz. warm water and yeast together and let stand in a warm, draft-free place to proof for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl and whisk until completely blended. The flours are pretty fine, so keep the whisking motion low. And using a deep bowl helps keep the flour cloud down a bit.

In another bowl. blend eggs together with remaining water and oil. Add in yeast mixture and blend well. Add to dry ingredients and combine until blended and smooth. Scrape into greased loaf pan.

Heat oven to 170 degrees F and then turn off. Place loaf pan inside a clean plastic bag (I use a shopping bag from grocery or store) and loosely tent it. Close oven door and let rise until mostly doubled, about 1 hour.

Take loaf pan out, turn oven back on to 375 degrees F and remove plastic bag. Bake 30-35 minutes, or until top is nicely golden-brown. Let cool in pan for several minutes, then carefully tap it out onto a cooling rack and let finish cooling.

When completely cool, slice, wrap and stick it in the freezer to use as necessary.

Makes one loaf.

Looking forward to seeing what the other creative and talented GF Ratio Rally bakers will be pulling out of their ovens tomorrow! Be sure to check over at Karen's blog to see links to all the other blogger's bread recipes. And come back next month to see some gluten-free cracker and breadstick recipes when it's my turn to host the GF Ratio Rally.