Gluten-Free Bread and Pizza Dough

Let me be quick.  I was recently offered the opportunity to become the gluten-free bread supplier for a restaurant in our area.  The parameters of this informal contract were very loose.  Basically, come up with any gluten-free bread product - loaf, roll, bun, pizza shell, form doesn't matter - and as long as it doesn't taste of dirt, they would buy it.  This seemed like a great opportunity for me so I jumped into experimenting.

I consulted all the books available through the Onondaga County Library system including, Gluten-Free Quick & Easy, Great Gluten-Free Baking, and Flying Apron's Gluten-Free and Vegan Baking Book.  All the books provided great insight into the world of gluten-free baking.  Yet when it came to bread and pizza dough -which I started working on as well - they all differed radically in both technique and ingredients.  With no true consensus, it was clear that trying to come up with a utilitarian gluten-free dough might be an expensive endeavor.  I held out hope that my first try would be a success and I wouldn't have to keep buying small quantities of experimental supplies.  Of course this was not to be.

Tapioca flour, garbanzo bean flour, brown rice flour, xanthan gum, guar gum, corn starch, potato starch, white rice four, sweet white sorghum flour, flax meal, and dried milk powder have all found their places in our cupboards these past few weeks.  And of course large quantities of pantry items like maple syrup, yeast, salt, sugar and even some of our supply of pureed pumpkin, have gotten tossed into doughs that more closely resemble batters.  I've made doughs that need to rise, doughs that rise in the oven as it heats from cold, and doughs that rise to a certain point and are quickly thrown into a hot oven before collapsing from the absence of glutenous structure.  I won't get into the mixing of ingredients.

While all of my efforts have been edible, the texture of my gluten-free breads far from resemble what us gluten-eaters regularly enjoy.  I am faced with a truly existential conundrum.  Does gluten-free "bread" offer any meaning, purpose, or value?  Obviously people who are intolerant to gluten want to enjoy bread, so value and purpose are pretty simply covered.  But, it seems to me that bread ceases to be bread in any meaningful way when gluten is subtracted.  It is not merely a matter of semantics.  While attempts to simulate certain qualities of bread bring it closer to its plutonic form, the idea of a bread free of gluten is an existential absurdity.  The only meaningful criteria are taste and texture.  "Bread" made with rice and bean flours, tuber starches and gum extracts from tropical plants and microbes simply lacks the taste and mouth-feel of  bread made from grasses in the Triticeae tribe.  Therefore, I have more or less concluded that gluten-free "bread" lacks meaning.

Yet, meaning is subjective, as Ortega y Gasset wrote, "yo soy yo y mis circunstancias."  Perhaps gluten-free bread is, in this odd existential way, the essence of bread as determined by this particular restriction.  While my efforts may in fact be useless, I can find something amounting to purpose in the task and pursuit of baking a "bread" that in fact lacks gluten.  But will the pursuit of this newfangled purpose drive me insane?

It might crumble, it might take two hours to bake, taste like moistened soil, and cost $10 per loaf, but for a person unable to comfortably digest gluten, this is as close to bread as they can get.  Which brings me back to the issue of semantics - am I willing to call it bread ?

An additional, slight non sequitur - People who have celiac disease, the autoimmune disorder of the small intestine that results in the necessity of a gluten-free diet, should petition the pharmaceutical industry to work on creating a drug or supplement that can neutralize the three inflammatory peptides found in gliadin.  I'm sure with the rise of diagnoses, and the subsequent profitability of potential remedies, drug companies are already researching and devising some enzyme to make gluten-containing foods digestible without irritation for sufferers of celiac.

It would be a tremendous favor to me, if gluten-free folks could pop a pill, or I could sprinkle a teaspoon of magic into my regular bread, and not worry about stocking all these random flours, starches, and gums.  


Come on PFIZER!  No one really wants to eat this!

doesn't taste better than it looks