Food Restrictions: Attempting a Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Soy-Free, Rice-Free Diet

I’ve tried a few gluten-free breads from scratch, with ok results.  Soon, however, we’ll be able to try wheat again, and “regular” bread will be a possibility.  The problem, however, is that all of the store-bought breads I’ve looked at have either soy, dairy, or both.  We won’t retry dairy until July, and soy seems to still be a problem, so homemade bread is in our future.

My husband consented to me getting a new bread machine for this endeavor.  (He loves fresh bread, so it didn’t take too much convincing.)  My goal was to find a machine that had a traditional-shaped loaf, and that would work well for gluten-free breads, in case we need to continue on that road.

I settled on the Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine.  Several gluten-free websites said this was a good model for gluten-free breadmaking.  Although it does not have a preprogrammed gluten-free cycle, it can be manually programmed to work well with gluten-free blends.

To assist with programming and to find some good gluten-free bread recipes, I bought Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine.  The benefits of this book were two-fold for me:  the author explains exactly how to program this model of bread machine for gluten-free baking, and her flour mix of tapioca, millet, sorghum, corn starch, and potato starch makes use of ingredients my son can have (and that I had in my kitchen).  The only substitute I made was using almond milk in place of dairy milk, and it seemed to work out fine.

UPS dropped off my packages at 3:30 p.m., and by 10:00 I’d made my first two loaves of gluten-free bread, impressed with the results.  The white sandwich bread came out beautifully and was a hit with bothy my husband and son, who snacked on it before bed.  The cinnamon swirl bread left a wonderful smell in the house, and a slice went to school in my son’s lunch today.  Both loaves are much better than anything I had made by hand previously.

I also bought The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread: More Than 200 Wheat-Free Recipes, but that one’s going back.  It was written in 1999, before millet and sorghum flours were readily available, and relies heavily on rice and bean flours.  Since my son can’t have rice, this is not useful for me.  It does have a lot of recipes, however, so for bakers who like to use rice or bean flour it would be a good book.

Today I’ll try some traditional bread for the rest of the family so I can put the gluten-free slices in the freezer.  I need to get to the store and get more millet flour and tapioca flour so I can keep baking.  It’s nice to have good bread for my son to eat again.