Ted Shoemaker wrote in :

>
> Hello,
>
> My (very limited!) experience with making wheat-free bread is that it
> doesn't rise properly. Assuming that we want to make a wheat-free,
> gluten-free bread, what do you recommend, to keep it rising?

GF baking is, in general, a terrible bother but also a requirement in
this house. Here's what we've done:

Easiest:
Just buy some GF bread from the local health food grocer. Most of the
rice-flour based breads are very heavy and not really all that tasty.

Easier:
Get a bread machine and GF bread mix and use it instead of from scratch.
Some of the mixes are actually pretty good, but you'll have to experiment
based on what's available in your area. If you can't find locally, you
can also order them online from several suppliers -- google terms such
as: gluten free, wheat free, celiac.

Not so easy:
A lot of the from scratch recipes we've found use xanthan gum or guar gum
in addition to various *mixtures* of different types of GF flour to
replace what's lost by not using wheat flour. As you're finding out (just
as we did), however, it's generally best to follow a recipe and get a
decent bread from it, then start tweaking the ingredients later. As a
bonus, you can save some time and effort if GF bread products are going
to be common in your home by using a bread machine with the from scratch
recipes too.

We've found a couple good GF recipe books that you may want to check out:

The Gluten-Free Gourmet by Bette Hagman
Includes a discussion of different types of GF flours and "stretchers"
(gluten replacers), and about 30 bread recipes of different types.

Wheat-Free Recipes and Menus by Carol Fenster, Ph.D.
Includes tips on making handy ready-to-use GF flour mixes, and charts and
conversions for all sorts of GF flours, mixes, stretchers (called
thickeners in this book) and so on, as well as recipes for several types
of bread, including the *best* GF bread I've found so far, and absolutely
wonderful Russian Black Bread.

Each book has several recipes for different breads; I can post a recipe
if you like. Just let me know what sort it is -- obviously, Russian Black
Bread is going to be very different from a hamburger bun or buttermilk
biscuits.

--
~sethra