Gluten-free Breads I

This is the intro section to Rice Breads, From Laurel’s Kitchen Bread
Book (for those of you who don’t know, Laurel’s Kitchen et al are
vegetarian cookbooks -thus her reference to a diet not centered
around meat…)

RICE BREADS: “For those who cannot eat wheat, a whole-foods diet that
is not centered around meat poses challenges. Of course there are
many, many interesting grain dishes, especially when you look to the
cuisines of the East. But for a Western palate, nothing can quite
take the place of bread, and nothing is so convenient or so
comfortingly familiar– sandwiches and toast, how could we get along
without them? In this chapeter we offer a selection of breads and
other good foods that will be useful to those who may be allergic to
wheat, rye, oats, barley, and other grains, and to milk and eggs as
well. The recipes presented here are good but they only suggest the
wide range of possibilities.

We recommend using short- or medium-grain brown rice. Flour made from
long-grain rice makes bread with a sandy texture. You may run across
something called “glutinous rice.” Don’t worry, there’s no gluten in
it: it just gets sticky when cooked, a quality required in certain
recipes — not, however, those in this book. Plain ordinary short-
or medium-grain brown rice is fine.

Rice flour, like cornmeal, performs much better in every way when it
is freshly ground; this is true even if your grinder, like ours,
can’t make it into a fine powder.”