Gluten Free Portland

Your go-to resource for all things gluten-free PDX.

News Bites on a Friday: Gluten Free Buns, Cookies, Cream Puffs, Pies

Seems like all you need to do to get MY attention these days is say the word “cookie.” My doctor has me on a no sugar, low carbohydrate diet so that I can lose some weight, and it’s been hard walking around in the grocery store when I know that there are some gluten-free goodies calling my name. On the plus side, it’s working. I’ve lost about ten pounds since I started. All this ignoring cookies and pies is starting to get on my nerves, though. On to the news!

Jensen’s Buns Now Available

A couple of months back we got a sneak preview of Jensen’s gluten-free buns and mentioned how awesome they were. At the time, they weren’t available, but we heard from them recently that they finally are. Jensen’s have announced that their buns are available at Lingonberries in Vancouver and Lambs in Lake Oswego (and some of the other Lamb’s markets – check with your local one). They are also providing buns to the Corbett and Hawthorne Fish Houses. Anybody out there tried their buns? Let us know!

Crave Bake Shop is Making Cream Puffs and Other Things

We heard from Crave Bake Shop that they are now offering gluten-free cream puffs and are working on recipes for cookies, pies, tarts and cobblers. If you haven’t checked them out yet, we think you should (see our review, here).

Sweetpea Cookies and Brownies Available at Whole Foods

Continuing with our sweet streak, I noticed recently (before I started this diet) that Sweetpea Bakery has gluten-free cookies and brownies available at Whole Foods.

Best Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Evar

The chocolate chip cookie is really amazing and is like how I remember chocolate chip cookies to be when I was a kid. They’re really delicious. (Note that these items have the “made in a facility shared with wheat” disclaimer). This makes the sweets area of Whole Foods really dangerous for me!

Petunia’s Pies and Pastries

Writes owner Lisa Clark:

Gluten free pie? You’ve found it! I have a new gluten free/vegan pastry business in N Portland called Petunia’s Pies & Pastries! I am currently selling at the Portland Farmers Markets: PSU 8:30-2 Saturdays, Sundays @ the King Market (NE 7th & Wygant)10-2, and Mondays starting June 21 @ Pioneer Square 10-2. I also take orders through my website.

Send Help!

Seeing as how I can’t eat any of these items any time real soon, I’m depending on our readers to check some of these items out and report back!!!

Bread Recipe: Gluten Free Cooking School Sandwich Bread

Here’s our next candidate in the series of gluten-free bread recipes we’re reviewing here. We’re looking for the best gluten-free bread recipe that the Internet has to offer. This next one comes to us via Gluten Free Cooking School dot Com and is their “Really Good Sandwich Bread.” I picked this one simply because it came up as number one in a Google search and looked like a basic gluten-free white bread. As we’ll be doing with all the recipes in this series, we used our bread machine to bake it. (Shameless plug: don’t miss our guide to gluten-free bread machines.)

I’m not going to include the recipe here. I followed this one to the letter. To make the bread, you need to make up a batch of their all-purpose gluten-free flour mix, here, and then add basic bread ingredients that go in most breads. The one item that’s a little troublesome is that the flour mix calls for masa harina. This is a special kind of corn meal that you can usually find in the Mexican food area of your local supermarket. Masa is corn (usually hominy) that has been boiled with lime and water and then dried. In Mexican cooking, this is what corn tortillas, tamale shells, and other corn items are made from. Strangely, our local Whole Foods didn’t carry it. Fred Meyer transferred me all over the store looking for it, and finally told me that they didn’t have it. I ended up going there for something else later that day, and it turned out that they did have it on the shelf. The proportion of masa harina in the mix is pretty low, and I think that a person could probably just substitute a fine corn meal. Later note: we heard from the author that a better substitute is almond flour.

In the recipe, they tell you to throw the mixed ingredients into your bread machine and set it to the “80 minute setting.” This ends up being infuriatingly general. I would have liked to have known what that meant. For example, does that mean 20 minutes of rising and 60 minutes of baking? Or 20 minutes of kneading, 20 minutes of rising, and 40 minutes of baking? Who knows? Many times with recipes on the Internet, a person can check the comments section for more information or better ways of doing a recipe. Unfortunately, this recipe has almost 300 comments, half of which seem to be people discussing baking the bread without a machine. The more I read, the more confused I got. Later note: The author has updated the cooking time information so that it is very clear.

I would tell you what we did, except that it didn’t really work. We ended up having some bread machine problems, too. When we tried to program 20 minutes of rising and 60 minutes of baking, our machine turned itself off after the rising. It was another 20 minutes before we discovered that the bread was cooling instead of baking. Here’s what we ended up with (another short loaf).

White Gluten-Free Sandwich Bread

Definitely take my review with a grain of salt, because the bread didn’t come out the way it probably should have. That said, if you’re looking for a relatively flavorless, inoffensive, white bread then you’ve come to the right recipe. The bread by itself tastes a tad strange, but when paired up with other things the flavor fades into the background. The flour mix is basically corn, brown rice, and soy flour, which is probably more nutritious than some of the breads that are simply rice four and starch. So that’s a good thing.

On the down side, the bread doesn’t really brown in a toaster, and I wasn’t really impressed with it as toast. As a sandwich bread, we tried it with hamburgers, BLTs, and grilled cheese sandwiches with our Panini press. (After a month-long Panini grill search, we got a Cuisinart Griddler, which we’ve been very happy with.)

Gluten-Free Panini Sandwich

I’m kind of surprised at how popular this bread seems to be. Neither of us was very impressed by it. The bread is better than the Trader Joe’s gluten-free rice bread, but that’s not saying much. I personally preferred the Bob’s Red Mill Homemade Wonderful Bread Mix, which we reviewed here. A person would be much better served by the Teff Bread that we reviewed last time, our favorite gluten-free millet oatmeal bread, or any of the breads we’ve tried from Gluten Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine by Annalise G. Roberts, which we reviewed here.

This is just a very long-winded way of saying that neither of us liked this bread, and I’m scratching my head over why it’s so popular. At the same time, it didn’t really turn out right, so maybe more testing is called for.

Easy to Make: 2 out of 5
Sandwich Bread: 2 out of 5
Toast Bread: 1 out of 5
Overall Score: 1 out of 5

We are always looking for another bread recipe to make. Do you have a favorite gluten-free bread recipe? Send us an email or leave a comment here!

Gluten-Free Bread: Dark Teff Sandwich Bread

I’ve decided to start a new series of posts dedicated to trying out different gluten-free bread recipes from around the Internet. Basically all the gluten-free bread you can buy at a store is unsatisfying, so we make our own using a bread machine. Here’s our guide to gluten-free bread machines. We also use the bread machine program recommended by Analise Roberts in her book about cooking bread with bread machines.

We already have a favorite gluten-free bread, but I think that it’s good to experiment and try new things. You never know when you’re going to find something better. This week I tried out an interesting recipe from the Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen. It’s their Dark Teff Sandwich Bread. I made some small changes to the recipe.

1 ½ cups warm water
1 package dry active yeast
1 teaspoon organic cane sugar
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil or grapeseed oil
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons ground flax seeds
2 cups teff flour
½ cup arrowroot powder
½ cup tapioca flour
1 ½ teaspoons xanthan gum
¼ teaspoons sea salt

I’ve bumped down the salt quite a bit and removed some of the sweetener choices. The star of the show in this bread is teff. Teff is known for being very nutritious. Among other things, it is high in phosphorus, has a very high calcium content, and contains plenty of iron, copper, aluminum, barium, and thiamin. Teff is also high in protein. Arrowroot powder and tapioca flour are both more starchy flours, and aren’t amazingly good for you. Here is nutrition information for teff, tapioca, and arrowroot.

Teff Flour for gluten-free bread

The recipe on the Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen’s site is for making the bread by hand, but my plan is to make all these recipes with our bread machine. Mostly because that’s the way it’s going to work for us in “real life.” As such, I’m going to rewrite the directions here. Basically, it amounts to mixing the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients. Then adding them to your breadmaker per the manufacturer’s instructions.

In addition to measuring, one thing we’re especially careful about is making sure that everything is the proper temperature. So the water needs to be between 100 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m pretty sure that everything else can be added at room temperature.

Teff Bread Loaf

Here’s the finished loaf. Yes. Yes. We were underwhelmed by the amount it rose. I want to keep in mind that a short loaf like this could very well be my fault. With bread, it’s hard to see something as a pattern until you’ve made the same recipe a number of times. It could also be the program I’m using on the bread machine. As could be expected from the amount it rose, the bread is pretty dense. Teff has a sort of sour nutty flavor, and the finished bread tastes almost like a mild dark rye bread.

Teff Bread Chicken Sandwich

The name of the bread includes “sandwich,” which to me means that it’s probably going to be a lighter bread that doesn’t have so much flavor that you can’t taste anything else in your sandwich. We found that to be the case with this bread. The bread doesn’t really toast much, but on the good side that means it isn’t easy to burn in the toaster. While it doesn’t exactly shine with some butter and honey or jam on it, the bread is very good for sandwiches.

Gluten Free Teff Bread with Eggs

My favorite application for this bread so far has been with eggs. There’s something about the flavor of the bread that makes it go really well with egg yolks. I bet it would make for a great egg sandwich. Sienna and I both liked this bread and we agreed that we should do some more experimenting with it. Here’s how it does with our new-fangled scoring system.

Easy to Make: 3 out of 5
Sandwich Bread: 3 out of 5
Toast Bread: 2 out of 5
Overall Score: 3 out of 5

We’re almost out of bread and are looking for another recipe to make. Do you have a favorite gluten-free bread recipe? Send us an email or leave a comment here!

Coming Product: Jensen’s Better Buns

We were contacted last month by Jensen’s Bread and Bakeries, who are working on bringing a brand new gluten free product to market in Portland, Oregon. Both David Jensen and his daughter, Brenna, were diagnosed with Celiac disease a few years ago, and like most people quickly learned that they weren’t going to have anything resembling real bread without some action on their part. Most of our readers can certainly relate, I’m sure. After suffering through months of awful imitations, they started making their own bread.

David’s wife, Debbie, who has been a recreational baker for over 40 years, started working on recipes to make better gluten free bread and buns. She and David spent two and a half years coming up with a product that they think is good enough to sell. Then they took a course at the Portland Small Business Development Center to figure out the next steps. They are almost ready to start selling them, and we got a sneak peek.

Jensen's Better Buns Packaging

The good news is that we have tried the buns and agree that they are awesome. The bad news is that you can’t buy them – yet. I met David last week and we talked about gluten-free bread, buns, and what the next step is for their company. David is very clearly serious about bread. They are in the process of getting a commercial kitchen set up and hope to get their products on shelves near you in the first quarter of this year.

Gluten-Free bun

Take a look at this. I brought one of these to work last week and a fellow co-worker who is also gluten-free saw it and couldn’t believe that it was a gluten-free bun. The buns are flexible and soft. They toast excellently and aren’t crumbly. They don’t need to be toasted and freeze well. The flavor is as close to a hamburger bun as I’ve had since I stopped eating the real thing. Sometimes buns and breads will end up having a beany flavor, or a corn aftertaste. These buns don’t suffer from that problem.

Gluten-free burger

Given buns like these, we had to make some hamburgers immediately! These make awesome hamburgers. They are the best gluten-free buns we have tasted and are head and shoulders above the competition. The Jensens have other gluten-free products in the pipeline, including sesame seed buns, multi-grain buns, and bread. You can check in on their progress on their website, Gluten-Free Concepts. They can be found on Twitter, here and on also Facebook, here. We’re looking forward to hearing more from them!

More News: Good News and Bad News

Sorry for the lack of reviews this week. I caught the cold that’s been making the rounds of Portland, and have been recovering. We’ve got a backlog of products and restaurants to post and I’ll get those out soon. I’ve got good news and bad news. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Bad News: Restaurant Closings

Over the weekend we decided to go get some delicious gluten-free pizza at Virgo and Pisces, and discovered that they have closed their doors. We had mentioned in our review that they seemed kind of empty the times we visited, so it looks like our fears were justified. I don’t know how much most people pay attention to restaurant closings, but there have been quite a few in the Pearl area in the past few weeks. Speaking of the Pearl, the Pearl branch of Blossoming Lotus closed. They still have a restaurant at 1713 NE 15th St. next door to Pete’s Coffee.

Good News: Restaurant List

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it lately, but our restaurant list is always growing. If you haven’t looked at it recently, you should check it out. Thanks to all the readers and restaurant owners who have contacted us with listings!

Maybe News: Amazon Sale on Bread Machines

I don’t know if this is really justified as news, but I’m always interested in bread machines. So I thought that I would pass it on that Amazon has announced discounts on bread makers. Among the sale items on their list are ones we have listed on our gluten free bread machine page. So they have: The Breadman TR875, which has a gluten-free setting. The Zojirushi BBCCX20, which doesn’t have a gluten-free setting, but is fully programmable (see our review here) and is dual-paddle. The West Bend 41300 Hi-Rise, which like the Zojirushi is programmable and dual-paddle. There are others, but those are probably the best three for being fully programmable or having a gluten-free setting. We’ve had both a Breadman and a Zojirushi and can vouch that they’re both excellent.

We Want to Know

Do you have any restaurants or cafes to add to our list? Let us know at the email address on the top right. Also, if you have any bread machine experiences or recommendations, let us know in the comments.

In the interest of full disclosure: Zojirushi sent us a breadmaker to test (and we like it!). See our disclosure policy here.

Product Review: Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Bread Mix

There certainly are a lot of gluten-free baking mixes available now. I was at Whole Foods a couple days ago, and noticed that Bob’s Red Mill has a gluten-free bread mix out, and that it can be made by hand or with a bread machine. I’m a little bit skeptical about a lot of these mixes, mostly because we always seem to have much better luck with our own mixes, but since it’s Bob’s Red Mill and can be made in a bread maker, I decided to give it a go. (Side note: Don’t miss our bread machine information page.)

Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Bread Mix

You may remember that we made scones with Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free baking mix. We found that the mix had a “beany” aftertaste, and several readers chimed in to support our opinion. So I was a little worried when I saw that Garbanzo Bean Flour was the first ingredient listed. Here are the ingredients: Garbanzo Bean Flour, Potato Starch, Corn Starch, White Sorghum Flour, Tapioca Flour, Evaporated Cane Juice, Fava Bean Flour, Xanthan Gum, Active Dry Yeast, Potato Flour, Sea Salt, Guar Gum, Soy Lecithin. For the record, the yeast isn’t mixed in. It comes in a little packet that is in the mix. If you give the mix a little taste, as one would expect, it tastes very beany, and is also surprisingly sweet. We decided to add some walnuts and chia seeds to our bread. Walnuts are great for flavor and also high in Omega-3 fatty acids. Chia seeds are the same seeds that go on those “chia pets” they sell at drug stores, and are also high in Omega-3.

Walnuts and Chia Seeds

The instructions on the package for making the bread with a bread machine are rather simple. You add milk, egg (and egg whites), butter or vegetable oil, and cider vinegar. The mix makes it very easy, and you’ll have everything in the machine in a couple of minutes. Our machine calls for adding the liquids first, then the dry ingredients, and then finally the yeast on top of the dry. The machine is supposed to bring everything to the right temperature, but we still raise the temperatures of everything before we add them, just so we don’t delay the yeast.

So we put the egg in some warm water, and also microwaved the milk until it was around 110 degrees. If you will be adding butter, you’ll want to melt it. We used grape seed oil. Once all the liquids are around the right temperature, you mix them up and you’re ready to go.

Ingredients in the Bread Machine

So how did it go? Well we were really amazed at how much the bread rose! We’re used to making bread and having it only raise a couple inches. Check out the difference between the photo on the top, which is from our gluten-free bread machine bake-off, using a flour recipe from Annalise Roberts’ book, Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine. The bottom photo is the loaf from the Bob’s Red Mill mix. That’s a really big difference! We had a little bit of trouble with the loaf shrinking a bit (which made the center of the top fall in a little), but not as much as we’ve had with other loaves that ended up getting big.

Bake-Off Loaves

Bake-Off Loaves

Bob's Red Mill GLuten-Free Bread

Bob's Red Mill Loaf

That’s really huge. We’ve become so used to eating short, rectangular sandwiches that this almost ends up being too much of a slice! So how is the bread?

Slices of bread

Here’s a picture so you can see the texture. Fresh out of the machine, the bread was very light, and almost spongy. (It was a pain to slice until we let it sit longer!) When it was warm, I thought the bread was delicious (Sienna thought the bread was just OK, flavor-wise, though she was pretty blown away with how much it rose), and didn’t suffer from the same bean flavor that their baking mix did. I was especially enamored of the crust, which tasted a lot like real bread crust. When it cooled down, though, the bread definitely had more of a bean aftertaste, and was kind of dry. So like a lot of other gluten-free breads, you’ll find yourself toasting this bread before eating it. I was still very impressed with how fluffy the bread was, and how well it rose. The folks at Bob’s Red Mill must know a thing or two about making bread rise.

Final analysis: This mix makes a really good sandwich bread. There is still a bit of a bean aftertaste when you eat the bread alone, but in sandwiches it isn’t really a problem. As mentioned above, like most gluten-free breads, it definitely benefits from being toasted. One thing I don’t mention above is that the mix is very easy to use. If you’ve spent any time mixing your own gluten-free flours, you’ll know how a lot of them are so fine that they end up everywhere and can make a real mess. We haven’t really looked into how the price compares to mixing your own, but based on the price of the mix on Amazon, a loaf is going to cost five bucks. Finally, the Bob’s Red Mill mix gets five stars for rising and making fluffy bread.

We want to know: Got a favorite gluten-free bread mix? Have a different experience with this one? We’re especially curious to know if others feel the bread tastes too much like beans. Let us know in the comments.

Times we have visited: 1 (so your results may vary.)
Overall rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Price compared to “regular”: Looks about twice as expensive as wheat-based mixes available online.

Gluten-Free Cooking Classes

Happy New Year! If your New Year’s resolution has anything to do with learning (and/or eating), then you’re in luck. Here are a bunch of gluten-free cooking classes happening soon in Portland, Oregon.

Cooking Class at Hipcooks

Course Title: I’m Free! Gluten-Free
When: Sun, Jan 31 – 11am-3pm
Description from the Website: Our Gluten-Free themed Class! Meals on the go, GF bread and Pasta, and Desserts! (The class is also dairy free) This extra-long session will offer advice on meal-planning, and will come with a wonderful take-home cookbook packed with recipes and GF tips.
Price: $80 per person
Hipcooks Website: http://portland.hipcooks.com/
Classes page: Hipcooks Class Schedule
Our Reviews: Fresh and Zingy 1 and Persian Immersion
(Note that other of their classes are also gluten free. Check the class descriptions page for more info.)

Cooking Class at Iorio Italian Restaurant

Course Title: “Gluten-Friendly” Cooking Class
When: Feb 20, 2010 – Noon to 2 PM
Description from the Website: A Heavenly class for GF’ers! Here’s your chance to bring your skills to a new level. Chef Chris will teach you how to command your gluten intolerance.
Price: $75 per person
Restaurant Website: http://www.ioriorestaurant.com/
Classes page: Iorio Cooking Class Menu
Our Restaurant Review: Iorio Review

Class at the Oregon Culinary Institute

Course Title: Gluten-Free Cooking and Baking
When: Saturday, February 20, 2010, 9 AM-1 PM
Description from the Website: Don’t let an allergy to wheat rob you of appreciating some of the finer things in life. This class will explore the cooking and baking options available to this sector of our hungry population. Understanding proper cookery of grains such as quinoa and rice is critical to discovering the versatility of your options, and we’ll cover that in this class. Using potato starch and rice flour and learning other new ingredients will be covered in order to make living gluten free an enjoyable lifestyle.
Price: $85.00
Website:http://www.oregonculinaryinstitute.com/
Class Page: Gluten-Free Cooking and Baking

Class at Bob’s Red Mill

Course Title: Gluten-Free Baking with Tiff Mumma!
When: Thursday, January 28, 2010 5:00-7:00 PM
Description from the Website: Let’s face it gluten-free baking can be a challenge, knowing which flours to blend and what to use as replacement for gluten can be frustrating. Tiff an avid gluten-free baker, is back to help put an end to your gluten-free baking challenges. Whereas many people view their diagnosis as the beginning of “living without” Tiff sees the transition to a gluten-free lifestyle as an opportunity to expand her diet to include a variety of grains. Her class menu will focus on: Banana Cake, Cinnamon Rolls, Potato Bread, Pumpkin Bread and Zucchini Bread. Come enjoy an evening filled with fabulous instruction and priceless baking tips!
Price: $40.00
Website:http://www.bobsredmill.com/
Classes Page: Bob’s Red Mill Class Schedule

Bread Machine Jam!

OK OK I’m a little late with this feature. We’ve been super-busy. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to slow down a little bit during the next two months. I keep meaning to put together this feature and here goes. We made jam with our bread machine. To be more specific, we used some plums from a tree in our back yard to make jam. We made it without a lot of sugar, too. If you get the right kind of pectin, you don’t have to add a ton of sugar to get your jam to thicken up.

Plums Ready to Go!

Plums Ready to Go!

Everything Else You Need

Everything Else You Need

Here’s what you need: Some fruit, sugar, lemon juice, pectin, and water. And a breadmaker. The pectin we use is Pomona’s Universal Pectin. As mentioned above, this is a special pectin which lets you cut down the sugar in the recipe. It uses calcium to activate it. We did it with plums, but you can use about anything. For jams, you can use kiwi, strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry, blackberry, currant, cherry, plum, pineapple, mulberry, blueberry, pear, mango, peach, apricot, fig, or citrus fruit (for marmalades). For jelly, you could use apples, quince, blackberries, pomegranate, raspberry, currants, grapes, or peppers. We used our Zojirushi bread machine, but most other bread machines also have the ability to make jam. You can get the pectin on Amazon, but we got ours at Whole Foods.

Here’s our recipe:

Low Sugar Plum Jam – Bread Machine

  • 2 cup cubed, mashed plums (about 16 small plums)
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 1/2 tsp pectin powder
  • 2 tsp calcium water

(The calcium water is some regular tap water with calcium powder that comes with the Pomona’s pectin. You make that beforehand.)

  1. Cut up plums in 1/8ths and microwave for a few minutes to soften. Mash plums briefly.
  2. Add lemon juice and calcium water to plums.
  3. Add pectin to sugar.
  4. Put all ingredients in bread machine, set on Jam Setting, and press start.
Plums and Ingredients in the Bread Machine

Plums and Ingredients in the Bread Machine

Program up the Bread Machine

Program up the Bread Machine

It's Jam!

It's Jam!

Spread that Jam on some Gluten Free Bread

Spread that Jam on some Gluten Free Bread

  • Resulting Batch – 2 1/2 c
  • Prep Time – 20 min
  • Cooking Time – 1 1/4 hrs
  • Total Time – 1 hr 35 min
  • Difficulty – Semi Easy

Here is a helpful card with recipes and instructions that you can download from Pomona’s website (it’s a PDF).

How is the jam, you ask? The jam is AMAZING! Also, Sienna went through the trouble to put the jam in canning jars. She had a lot of fun.

Gluten-Free Breadmaker Bake-Off!!!

In May I reviewed Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine by Annalise Roberts. Click here for the review. One of the things that came up in the review (and in the comments) was that the author basically says that the book was written with one bread machine in mind. That is the Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine. We were kind of disappointed but decided to test out the recipes using our Breadman Pro bread machine.

Roberts details a specific program for the Zojirushi that she claims is the best for the recipes in her book. Fortunately for us, the Breadman that we have is a little bit programmable. You can specify what they call “courses.” Different courses have different preheat, kneading, rising, punching, and baking times. Sienna was able to figure out which Breadman “course” was the closest to Roberts’ Zojirushi program.

After baking some bread with our Breadman and being impressed with the taste of these recipes, we had an idea. We thought that it would be interesting to get our hands on a Zojirushi and test to see if there really was a big difference in quality between bread made in a Zojirushi and bread made in a Breadman. We wrote to Zojirushi with our idea and they very kindly agreed to send us a machine for testing. Thank you Zojirushi! (Please see here for our disclosure policy.)

Differences Between the Bread Machines

Right now would be a good time to talk about some of the differences between the two bread machines. The Zojirushi has two paddles instead of just one. As a result, there tends to be less of a need to babysit the mixing process. Having two paddles means that there are two holes in the bottom of the finished loaf instead of just one. At the same time, the holes are a lot smaller and don’t tend to cut so far into the slices, so there isn’t as much “spoilage” with huge dents into the slices.

As mentioned above, our Breadman has pre-programmed “courses,” which are more like sets of instructions that govern preheating, kneading, rising, punching down, and baking. One course might have a longer kneading cycle, or punch down more times than another, for example. Thus you are limited to choosing between these predetermined courses. On the Zojirushi, you can program just about everything, and even choose to skip forward to the next step in a program. In this regard the Zojirushi is far superior to the other machine.

Some smaller but notable differences include: the Zojirushi is much more quiet when mixing; the pan on the Zojirushi is wider by maybe a quarter inch; and we felt that the manual for the Breadman is more helpful than the one for the Zojirushi. See our Bread Machine info page for more information about differences between bread machines for gluten-free cooking.

The Bake-Off

For the bake-off, we made sure to keep things as even as possible. All the ingredients came from the same place and were as equal in temperature as we could get them. We also measured very carefully to make sure that any differences in the bread would come from variations in moisture or proportion. We ran both bread machines at the same time in the same place in the kitchen. Here were our results:

Gluten Free Bread Machine Bake-Off

Breadman Bread Sliced to Show Paddle Hole and Texture

Breadman Bread Sliced to Show Paddle Hole and Texture

Zojirushi Sliced to Show Paddle Hole and Texture

Zojirushi Sliced to Show Paddle Hole and Texture

As you can see, the resulting loaves are almost identical in the photos. The Zojirushi loaf, as could be expected, was a little wider and thus lost a little height to the Breadman loaf. The flavor and texture of the two loaves was basically identical. We were disappointed with how much both loaves rose, but that’s something we’re working on and are starting to have some success with.

The Results

Surrey Books, the publisher of Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine, will be happy to know that our testing didn’t reveal any great differences between loaves using any of the recipes we’ve tried (so far) when cooked with a Zojirushi vs. a Breadman. At the same time, the Zojirushi very quickly became more popular in our kitchen than the Breadman. It is programmable, quieter, and does a better job of mixing the ingredients.

We want to know: Do you have any opinions about different bread machines? Any tricks or suggestions for getting gluten-free bread to rise more? Would you buy a bread machine because of a book? Let us know in the comments!

The Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine on Amazon

Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine on Amazon

News Bite: New Cascadia Grand Opening Celebration

Gluten-Free Coffee Cake

New Cascadia Traditional bakery, purveyor of gluten-free baked goods with a dedicated gluten-free facility, has announced a grand opening celebration for their new location which will be on Friday, September 25. They are at 1700 SE 6th Avenue, two blocks south of Hawthorne. You might be thinking: “Haven’t they been there a while?” and you would be right. That’s OK though. Here is their announcement:

You are invited to our Grand Opening Celebration at our new location (1700 SE 6th Avenue, two blocks South of Hawthorne Blvd.) on Friday, September 25th.
We will be giving away great raffle prizes including gift certificates, t-shirts, tote bags (perfect for carrying your gluten free goodies), bread knives, and more!

There will be samples of some of our products, there will new products to showcase and there will be mini cupcakes for all (or until we run out)!

The fun will begin at 8:00 a.m. and continue throughout the day.

Please join us in the festivities-we would love to see you.

They are also announcing new hours:

Beginning Monday, September 21st, we will be open each and every Monday at 7:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m. for your convenience.
We will offer a more streamlined menu, featuring our most popular gluten free items.
Of course we will have our full espresso and coffee menu (enhanced by our Stumptown Coffee beans!) as well as a complimentary selection of DragonFly Chai teas for your enjoyment.
Look for our new offerings of organic loose leaf teas coming in the next few weeks-just in time for the cooler months.

AND:

Portland Pedal Power & New Cascadia Traditional TM Team Up to bring you our gluten free products via bicycle delivery…
Portland Pedal Power is a bicycle delivery service catering to the downtown Portland area and close-in NW and they will be able to deliver our goods to you once a week! For those of you who aren’t able to get over to our new location, this may be a great option!
They offer a terrific service and we are proud to be partnering with them. Place your order through their website by 4:00 p.m. every Monday for delivery the following Wednesday afternoon.
Please check out their website for more information or to place your first order:
www.portlandpedalpower.com

We have reviewed them several times in the past. Their gluten-free breads. Cinnamon Roll and Sugar Cookies. And their new location in July. (My word! Where has the Summer gone?)