Real Food: Gluten-free Bread and Cakes from Your Breadmaker (Real Food)

"I bought this book as a companion for the Panasonic SD253 Breadmaker, which it lists as a suitable breadmaker for the recipies in the book, I have now been using it ( and the breadmaker) for about a month. The recipe for the bread mix I have found one of the most useful things,it gives a flour mix that is stable and well behaved, holds a good rise and -most importantly, makes bread that tastes like bread, and not some weird experiment in a chemical lab, which is what most commercial bred tastes like! I started off with the basic everyday white bread mix, which worked well, gave a good, well flavoured loaf, which lasted well, and was moist enough to toast when it went a bit stale. The milk loaf recipie just doesn't work, I think there must be a typo for the ammount of liquid in the mix, I ended up with a craggy bowling ball, not a loaf of bread and had to bin it and start again. The pain de chocolat sounded wonderfull, and are one of the things my partner misses most since being diagnosed gluten free, they took forever, and i'm sorry, but there are things that gluten free flour just will not do, and making puff pastry is one it was a big disapointment. The one thing that I did find worked superbly well was the focaccia bread. If you buy this book, just try this one, i promise you it will become a staple. it works well as a whole loaf on a baking tray, or split into four and made into four rolls on a yorkshire pudding tray, it freezes well,reheats well, and toasts well when a bit stale. The bread tastes and smells wonderful, and uing the pizza dough programme on the machine, makes really fast fresh bread - 15 mins to knead, 45 mins to prove in a fan oven at 50C and 15 mins to bake at 190C. Try it, you won't regret it.
There are still lots of things I haven't tried in the book, and I look forward to doing so, but it is important not to follow the recipies blindly, you need to have a basic understanding of baking, and if a recipe looks like it shouldn't work, it probably won't. All in all, not the Holy Grail of gluten free baking, but a good attempt at it, and one written in a non prescriptive, friendly acessible everyday style.
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~ Written on 2007-05-28

"I was dianosed as a Coeliac very recently and having tried the store bought stuff I thought I'd try my own. I got the breadmaker (panasonic SD253) and, based on the reviews for this book, bought it.
I've had very mixed results. Some may think it's because of my novice bread-making skills, but I had my mother try some of the recipes I did and she got similar results (with a great deal of both machine and handmade bread making).
The milk loaf is a disaster, don't bother. The sandwich loaf is okay but I'm not keen on the taste of rice flour. I've just tried the everyday loaf and found the dough is really too dry (though I admit it tastes great).
In general I'm not hugely impressed with the recipes as is, but the basic idea is good and I think I'll be able to modify these recipes to my own taste. "
~ Written on 2007-03-11

"I bought this book after being diagnosed with a wheat intolerance and being unable to find good wheat free bread in stores. I managed to get all the flours needed from my local supermarket but was quite expensive when you compare to wheat/gluten flours. But the results were very good. Especially the blueberry muffins, they are lovely!
I would recommend this book to all those who are wheat/gluten intolerant, have Coeliac disease, etc. Being able to have bread & cakes that actually taste like bread & cakes is now a reality!"
~ Written on 2007-02-16

"I ordered this book from amazon at the same time I bought my breadmaker (a Panasonic SD252), and did so based upon the reviews of other breadmaker purchasers. I'd developed (very suddenly) a wheat intolerance not long before, and was scrambling rapidly to learn to bake without wheat, find some decent bread that didn't require a mortgage to buy a loaf (if you're wheat intolerant or coeliac, you know what I mean), and bought a number of books on w-f/g-f baking during those first few months of re-education. 9 months later, I can highly recommend Humphries' book: the "Multigrain loaf" & pizza crust recipes alone make the book worth every penny, but other recipes I've tried in it are good, too. It's become one of the wheat-free/gluten-free cookbooks I've come to rely upon the most, & can only imagine that others would, too!

About the pizza crust (just in case you're looking for a good one): It has fooled friends who can eat wheat and didn't realise it was wf till they saw me eat it; it freezes well before it's baked, in every form from a ball of dough to completely made up and topped with whatever you like -- I've done this many times so that I'd have a ready-meal waiting for me when returning from a long trip or long day at work, and just popped it in the oven (still frozen) and it came out beautifully. And the final proof (so far as I'm concerned) that it's a good recipe? Once you've baked it, the leftovers taste good cold the next day!"
~ Written on 2006-05-17

"This book is excellent. Alot of shop-bought gluten-free bread is plain horrid, commercial gluten-free bread mixes are OK but just don't hit the spot. These recipes for breadmaking machines are really good. OK - a bit of a hassle buying all the different flours to begin with - but there are internet sites you can buy from if you can't get them locally. And once you have stocked up on them you are away and, if my experience is anything to go by, protecting your bread from the rest of the family!"
~ Written on 2006-02-26