You too can make gluten free bread

This amazing looking loaf is the result of my husband saying 'How hard can it be?'. We had bought some gluten free bread, for our gluten challenged friend who was coming for lunch, but it really wasn't very appetising looking, so my husband, who makes wonderful sour-dough bread thought he would have a go and we bought some gluten-free flour to try. He didn't know how to do it though so I searched the net and finally came up with a recipe from Jamie Oliver. Most of the other recipes I found had all sorts of weird and wonderful ingredients that we didn't have and didn't want to have.

Jamie's recipe was only the starting point though, as his recipe called for wholemeal gluten-free flour and we only had white. Then David thought he really had to include his sour-dough starter. Now this does contain ordinary flour, but our friend is not an actual coeliac disease sufferer, so we assumed, and hoped, that the small amount of flour involved would not be a problem. And it wasn't. But if you want to try this and are worried about the flour - there are recipes for gluten-free sour dough starter out there. Or leave it out and just stick to Jamie's original recipe.

I think David also substituted verjuice for the white wine vinegar in the recipe, but otherwise followed it - including the eggs, which he was most dubious about.

He starts his bread mixtures off in the bread-making machine and when it had finished doing it's thing it produced an amazingly expanded and light and airy dough. We now think it was probably not necessary to leave it to rise some more after it had been put in the bread tin. But he did. He also did not make any cuts in the surface as he usually does.

So we waited and watched it in the oven and were amazed at how much more it rose - football size!

I must admit I thought that when it was cut into it would turn out to be one big air bubble and it would collapse in a heap. But no - we are assured that it was really nice, and the texture did look pretty bread-like, and our friend took the recipe (and the remains) away with her to try for herself. Because truly the stuff you buy is not very wonderful and is very expensive.

Well done David! Well done Jamie. Shows what you can do when you try.