My first attempt at homemade gluten free bread

I've always been known for my bread.  When invited to potlucks I am inevitably asked to bring the bread.  Homemade, with an airy crumb and a nice crispy crust, always freshly baked.  This type of bread baking usually takes the better part of a day, sometimes longer for breads such as ciabatta.  It involves mixing ingredients, kneading, rising, punching dough, maybe 1 or 2 more rising and punching down steps and then shaping and rising and baking.  Traditional, gluten containing bread baking is a very time consuming process so I never would have attempted it on a weekday afternoon.

But this bread is not like that.  This bread is more like a quick bread, in every sense of the word. First, it doesn't have any yeast in it.  Second, it's texture was more like a banana bread than a baguette and third, it took only a few minutes to fix up and get into the baking pans and into a preheated oven. Truly very quick.

The recipe I used can be found here. http://www.elanaspantry.com/paleo-bread/

This is a typical bread found in many paleo cookbooks and paleo recipe sites.  No grains of any kind. Lots of nuts, seeds and eggs.

So I mixed up the ingredients and popped the pan into the oven, set the timer to 30 minutes and waited.

The first difference I noticed between this bread and wheat bread is the smell.  The smell of this bread was nice, but there is nothing to compare to the smell of wheat bread baking.  This smell was sweeter and a little nutty.  Not unpleasant at all, just different.  Maybe someday wheat free breads will smell as good to me as wheat breads do.  

The next difference I noticed was that the bread didn't rise very much.  It was a much denser loaf of bread.  Again I will compare it to banana bread.  It had the same type of crumb and even a similar smell, sans bananas. 

Lastly was the flavor.  This didn't taste anything like one of my crusty French baguettes, but that doesn't mean it wasn't tasty.  To go along with the smell, it was indeed a little nutty and a little sweet.

Mike and I enjoyed some for dinner tonight.  I made sandwiches.  Fried egg, ham and cheese sandwiches, cooked like a grilled cheese, and accompanied by a big green salad.  The eggs were organic, the ham uncured and the cheese very sharp cheddar. Mike said it reminded him of a Monte Cristo.

While it was OK in a savory application, where I think it will really shine is in a sweeter application. Toasted with some butter and jam, or maybe with some peanut butter.  I think this is what this bread will excel at and I am looking forward to trying it this weekend.  Possibly with a homemade, stove top cappuccino. Stay tuned for that review later this week.