Real bread from nothing but rice?

April 11, 2012 2:57 PM

Has anyone tried making gluten-free bread with the Sanyo Gopan bread maker? This is a machine that takes in whole raw rice and mills it into bread in the machine.

I'd love to know how well it works because currently I have no bread substitute. On top of whatever (apparently not cœliac, but severe enough to keep my Crohn's out of remission) gluten sensitivity I have, I also have Crohn's disease, and big problems with the cellulose gums (xanthan gum, guar gum, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, etc) that make gluten free breads a tolerable facsimile of muggle bread. If anyone's got any experience with this machine, I'd love to know, before I go about finding the £500 which might finally give me a reliable convenient portable source of nutrition.

posted by ambrosen to Food & Drink (5 answers total)

Best answer: All of the rice based recipes for the gopan machine on their website include vital wheat gluten except for one. That one recipe does not look like it is a reasonable facsimile of wheat bread. There is also a book in Japanese about using the "zero wheat mode" with various recipes but they require specially milled rice flour which is probably not available if you live outside of Japan.
posted by Infernarl at 5:28 PM on April 11, 2012

Best answer: I've seen recipes using ground chia seed instead of the gums - just bought some, haven't tried it yet myself.
posted by leslies at 6:15 PM on April 11, 2012

Response by poster: Infernarl, thanks ever so much for looking at that. You'd be surprised to know that the bottom picture on the linked site looks like a pretty good substitute from where I'm standing, dense and doughy though it is. I don't speak or read Japanese. Can you tell me if the special flour in the Amazon book is mochi flour? I can get hold of that.

leslies (and bibliogrrl via MeFiMail), thanks for the chia seed suggestion. I do have some, but I didn't get on with it too well the time I tried. I think it's still a little too high fibre for me.
posted by ambrosen at 8:00 AM on April 12, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks guys. I'm pretty sure I'll go for it anyway, as long as I check first that I can cope with yeast.
posted by ambrosen at 4:07 PM on April 12, 2012

Best answer: The special flour is a type of mochi flour but it is very finely milled. I am guessing that the finely milled flour allows you to make a more bread like product (which is why a whole book is based around using it). I would see if you can find a small mill near you that already is selling a rice flour and ask them to mill it super fine.
posted by Infernarl at 8:07 PM on April 12, 2012