Barefeet in the Kitchen's GF Sandwich Bread

I just discovered this blog today, and am excited about it! Barefeet in the Kitchen is the food blog of Mary and her three boys, and is now a gluten free blog. I'm looking forward to trying out her recipes and learning from her experiences converting to gluten free. This recipe below is a wonderful staple for any gluten free home. Her Tender High Rise Gluten Free Sandwich Bread is the first real success I've had with baking anything gluten free that is supposed to rise. I've copied her recipe below (with my milk free substitute), for reference only, in a different colour font, and my notes. Please DO see her original post for detailed directions and photos for the steps as this recipe does have a few details that are important and she has had multiple questions about the recipe, which she answers in her comments.

Mary's Recipe

Mary's Ingredients:

• 2 cups brown rice flour
• 2/3 cup potato starch
• 1/3 cup tapioca starch
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 2 teaspoons instant yeast
• 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/4 teaspoons xanthan gum
• 1 cup warm milk
• 1/4 cup butter, softened to room temperature
• 3 large eggs

Mary's Directions: 

1. Combine all of the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl, or the bowl of your stand mixer. I've made this using both the KitchenAid and a hand mixer. Both methods work well, admittedly the stand mixer is much easier.
2. While using an electric mixer (hand mixer, or stand), slowly pour in the warm milk. The mixture will be mostly crumbs at first, but once all the milk is added, it will begin to come together. Add 4 tablespoons of softened butter and beat until thoroughly blended.
3. Add the eggs, one at a time. Beat the mixture after each egg is added, until it is thoroughly integrated before adding the next one. Once you’ve added all the eggs, beat the mixture at high speed for 3 minutes. This adds air to the thick batter, which helps take the place of the missing gluten as far as structure is concerned. It will create a much fluffier loaf of bread, similar to store bought varieties.
4. At the end of 3 minutes, the batter will look like thick, heavy buttercream icing: smooth and silky. It should not look at all like a typical yeast dough. The dough will be very sticky, and feel a bit gritty if you rub some between your fingers. Scrape the sides of the mixing bowl and leave the batter right in the bowl to rise for the first time.
5. Cover the bowl with a light towel or loose plastic wrap and let the thick batter rise for 90 minutes. This batter might not completely double in size, but it will puff up considerably.
6. Lightly grease a 8 1/2” x 4 1/2” loaf pan with butter. Gently stir the batter down. Scrape it into the prepared pan. The dough should still be wet and not at all knead-able. It reminds me of a very thick brownie batter at this stage. Using dampened fingers, or a wet spatula or bowl scraper; smooth the top, eliminating as many wrinkles, bubbles or creases as possible. The smoother your loaf is before this final rise, the smoother it will be once it’s baked. After the dough rises and bakes, the top of the loaf will look very much the same as it looks when you finish smoothing it out. It is worth a minute or two of effort to make it as smooth as possible now.
7. Loosely cover the pan with a towel (or a lightly greased piece of plastic wrap) and let the dough rise until it barely crowns over the rim of the pan. This will take 45 – 60 minutes, or possibly as much as 90 minutes, depending on the temperature of your kitchen. Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 350°F.
8. This dough is fairly delicate. Try not to touch it again at all. Any finger touch or bump will remain for the final product.
9. Bake the bread for 25 minutes, until golden brown. Remove it from the oven, and using hotpads for both hands, immediately turn it out of the pan onto a rack. Brush with a very small amount of melted butter to help keep the crust soft, and add flavor. Slice when completely cool. Enjoy!

My Adjustments and Observations

My First Time Making This:

What I did differently from the above recipe:

I can't drink milk, so I substituted soy milk. (I can eat butter, so I left that.) I also increased the xanthum gum because its my understanding that one is supposed to use 1tsp per cup of flour, so I used 1 Tbsp (3 tsp = 1 Tbsp).

My observations:

I admit it: I ate the entire loaf in 24 hours! It was so dang good! My dough was slightly thicker than Mary's pictures, and it didn't come out as fluffy as hers, but it seemed to come out stronger than her's looks like (less likely to fall apart). It actually even repeatedly survived the toaster! 

However, I don't think I let it rise enough, because I was afraid of it overflowing the pan as her's does, but I think with the extra xanthum (possibly why mine came out thicker) it can handle the extra rising. I also want to try a little extra yeast since mine didn't rise as much as her's - again because of the extra xanthum, I think. Also, I don't have an electric mixer of any kind right now and had to hand mix the dough, so that may have been a factor in its lack of fluffiness (less air in the dough). (I'm also wondering how the soy vs cow milk effected it, as soy milk has less fat.)

The odd thing, it tasted like a really light corn bread, even though there is no corn in this recipe - not that that's a bad thing, but possibly not what I personally want for sandwich bread. But I'll address that issue once I get the loftiness that I want. One nice thing I found out as well, as I accidentally left it out on the counter over night, was that even though it started to dry out slightly on the end it didn't dry out too much and it even added to the texture a little bit.

I'm  going to continue to make this and will keep updating this post with my changes and observations below here, and I will eventually also add my final recipe below too.

Second Try:

In addition to the changes I made yesterday, I whisked together all the wet ingredients before adding them to the dry. I also increased the yeast to 1 Tbsp, thinking it might help the bread be fluffier than yesterday, since I don't have an electric mixer - it didn't work and it has a bad yeasty flavour this time. Don't add extra yeast - yuck! I'm just going to have to get an electric mixer and try it that way.  
Also, my dough was much wetter today. I'm very careful about how I measure my flour but its still not consistent enough for gluten free baking which seems to be far less forgiving then wheat flour. I bought a food scale to start measuring my flour, to be sure I'm consistent, but it didn't come with the AAA batteries it needs - next week I'll try this again using weight to measure my flours.

Third Try:

This time, I made the bread as I did the first time, but I also added 1 Tbsp of baking powder. Per advice I found on other blogs, I added the baking soda to the milk, butter, and egg mixture, which produced a nice frothiness, before adding the wet ingredients to the dry.
The dough was thin enough that I was able to use the whisk attachment for my hand-held food processor to mix it hoping to get some more air into the dough. After a couple minutes the dough became thicker and stiffer (but not thick like regular gluten bread dough). 
My kitchen has been a little cool because of the winter weather, so I brought my small space heater into the kitchen and set it on a table across from where the dough was rising (about 5 feet). The thermostat said it was 77º in the living room after the heater ran for a while; my research discovered that the ideal temperature for yeast breads to rise at is 85º. Once it had stopped raising, I transferred it to the bread pan, and was more careful when pressing it in to fill the holes to be sure I did not deflate the rising that already occurred. I left the bread to continue to rise for several hours but it still barely rose; only a small part at the center barely rose above the edge of the pan. 
I just can't seem to get it to rise as well as Mary's. My yeast is only about a month old, so I know its good. Could the extra xanthum gum be the reason its not rising as much? Seems hard to believe. Maybe next time I'll try making this bread exactly as Mary's recipe states (except using soy milk) and see how it compares. It might be a little while though - I'm almost out of brown rice flour.
Cutting into the bread it is a bit fluffier than the previous two loaves - a product of the baking powder or the electric whisk? But the taste is still off - too yeasty. My research also indicated that too much rising time can cause breads to come out with a yeastiness to their flavour, and since this bread was rising for most of the day that could explain it since I didn't have this flavour the first time.

My Final Recipe

Ingredients:

Directions:

Notes: