I prefer to make my dough in my little compact bread machine these days because it’s so much less messy than using the stand mixer or–god forbid–my own two hands!
And I always like to try new gluten-free bread recipes whenever Susan is visiting, which she is doing next week along with Bob and their son, Nathan, and his partner, Kate (the latter two of whom we’ve taken to calling “The Giants” since they are both 6’4″).
I used this simple recipe to start but made the following adjustments: I used cashew milk rather than milk; I eliminated the water and increased the cashew milk; I used maple syrup rather than honey; and I mixed, kneaded, and proofed the bread in my breadmaker rather than the stand mixer.
So here we go!
Vegan, Gluten-Free Spelt Sandwich Bread
First off, make some cashew milk by soaking a half-cup of cashews in a cup of boiling water. Let sit for fifteen minutes and then dump in the Vitamix and mix until as smooth as milk. Strain through a mesh strainer.
Next, place in the bread machine in the following order:
- 1 TBS maple syrup
- 1.5 cups cashew milk
- 3 TBS olive oil
- 1.5 tsp sea salt
- 500 grams whole sprouted spelt flour
- 9 grams yeast
Set the machine to the dough program. Check the dough after the first knead to make sure it’s not too firm, and if it is, add a bit more cashew milk.
The dough program will be around 1.5 hours, but remove it after an hour and fifteen minutes and place in a covered greased loaf pan for fifteen minutes (in a warm spot). Now preheat the oven to 360 degrees.
The dough should puff up nicely:
Bake for 45 minutes or until the internal temperature is at 205F.
And here is our gluten-free beauty!
Now, in truth, I had all my ingredients prepared for this bread, but was listening to a podcast and became a bit distracted and without thinking, pulled out my bin of regular AP flour…completely disregarding the large jar of sprouted spelt flour I had at the ready. As I pressed the start button on the bread machine, I thought, OH SHIT! So I ended up making both a regular gluten-y loaf of this bread and a gluten-free loaf.
Here’s the regular loaf (which I misguidedly topped it with pumpkin and sunflower seeds, most of which fell off anyway):
It’s super delicious though! We had it toasted with some vegan chili for dinner. James was delighted with it!
I do always find it odd that the gluten-free loaves, which puff up so well on the counter, never quite rise to the occasion in the oven. Here’s a comparison of the same recipe with spelt flour and with regular AP flour:
And the song of the day is Rodriguez’s “I Think of You” because today is the eighteenth anniversary of the day my sweet boy, James, and I moved in together, and it’s such a pretty love song.
And here we are at my fiftieth birthday party at Bid’s house just a week before we made it official. It’s my favourite picture of the two of us (likely because we are eighteen years younger than we are now!).
Sideways Cottage... 