This month put the spotlight on the alternative Daring Bakers. With over 1000 Daring Bakers, there are quite a few who have limitations and restrictions and have to adapt the DB challenges to their dietary restrictions. I think the biggest groups of the alternative DBers are those who bake gluten-free, and those who are vegan. The recipes that we have for our challenges are already not always easy, and I would imagine that it can be hard to veganize something or adapt it to be gluten free. Many of the recipes are not very vegan friendly (flashback to all the challenges with buttercream, loads of eggs, pastry cream, etc), and of course nearly every challenge has flour in it.
Natalie (Sheltie Girl) from Gluten A Go Go and Shel (Shellyfish) of Musings from the Fish Bowl teamed up this month to bring the alternative Daring Bakers experience to us.
The recipe (which can be found on their blogs) was taken from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering The Art of Extraordinary Bread, by Peter Reinhart, and originally called for bread flour. However, Natalie and Shel adapted the recipe to be gluten free, and as Daring Bakers we had the option of either keeping the original recipe with wheat flour, or to make the gluten free version. Of course I decided to jump into this challenge and try the gluten free version (NB. “Jumping into the challenge” does not imply that the baking wasn’t procrastinatively last minute. And yes, procrastinatively is now a word).
But actually, it wasn’t very difficult, because we didn’t have to puzzle out how to adapt a recipe to be gluten free; the modified gluten-free recipe was already available to us. The main thing was just finding the gluten-free flour mix. At the supermarket near us, the only gluten-free flour blend we found didn’t have xanthan gum in it. I thought that maybe I could go for that and get xanthan gum separately at a health food store and add it in myself (the xanthan gum does the work the gluten normally does in regular baking and binds the dough together). But then in a stroke of luck, when my sister and I were on our way to one of the swing dance nights here in Montreal, we passed by a huge Provigo (supermarket) on Mount Royal and figured, hey, it would be worth a look to go and see what sort of GF stuff they had, and lo and behold, they not only had xanthan gum, guar gum and other such things, but they also had gluten free flour mixes with guar gum in it already. It was in a whole section of gluten-free things. However, the people working at the store didn’t know it existed. I didn’t really know the difference between how xanthan gum and guar gum work, but the xanthan gum was a lot more expensive. Anyway, we went with a flour mix with guar gum in it already, because that was the most economical and the easiest way to go about this, and then we headed to the dance.
*fast forward a day or so*
We followed the instructions and left the dough to rise for 90 minutes. But when we came back, instead of doubling in size, I don’t think it had grown at all. But I remembered that someone had mentioned that the xanthan gum/guar gum needs the water to work and so does the yeast and that sometimes adding a bit more water might help (or something along those lines), and I spritzed the dough with a bit more water and left it longer. When we came back a while later to look at it, it had actually grown a noticeable amount, though not double. Good enough, we figured, and rolled it out. The GF dough was hard to roll out super thin. From the DB forum, I knew I wasn’t the only one, but I still tried to get it as thin as possible.
The dough rolled out in all its glory
Well, it wasn’t quite thin enough. I think thinner would have made a better lavash. But anyway, it was still tasty. I spritzed the dough with water and sprinkled it with cumin seeds (mmmm cumin), and I thought it was really good. The thinnest parts were best ,but it was good stuff all the same.
The baked lavash. Nyom nyom.
Nyom nyom nyom
The last part of this challenge was to make a vegan/gluten free dip to go with the lavash. I plead 100% guilty to leaving it so last minute, but I didn’t have time to do this. I think I’ll still try, but it’s gonna be late. But here I am pretending I did actually make my own dip by taking some photos with the lavash and some hummus (store bought, I confess. I have yet to get around to making my own). No one will be the wiser. Besides, I’m distracting you with pictures of yummy food so you won’t even pay attention to this text, right?😉
With some hummus now
Lavash plus dip equals yum
And so there we have it; the challenge was an awesome one. I learned a lot doing this one. Now go drool over all the other DB lavashes at the blogroll.
