High protein wheat free bread - recipe

After months of research in my cuisine laboratoire* I have come up with a wheat –free recipe for bread, that works.

Ingredients:

1 level teaspoon sugar

150 ml milk, warmed slightly to tepid

100g oat flour

1 sachet (11g) dried yeast,  or use live yeast if you prefer

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

½ teaspoon salt

50g rolled oats

200g chickpea (gram) flour

50g butter, melted

1 large egg

1 tablespoon warm water, to moisten

Olive oil

Set the oven at 190ºC

Warm the milk to tepid, dissolve the sugar in it. Mix the dried yeast, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt with the oat flour.

Pour the warm milk and sugar mixture into the oat flour, stir and leave to stand 10 minutes.

Beat the egg. Melt the butter and cool a little.

Add the rolled oats, the chickpea flour, the egg and the butter to the mixture, and stir for 5 minutes. Add a little warm water to moisten the mixture – the dough should be hard to stir but not impossible.

Cover with a damp cloth, and leave in a warm place for 2-3 hours. It will rise a little.

Oil a small bread tin, and line with greaseproof paper (baking parchment.)

Put the mixture into the tin. Using the back of a spoon, oiled with olive oil, smooth off the top, spreading a little oil across the top as you do so.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 30 minutes. Check with a skewer – it should come out dry.

Remove from oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes in the tin. Then turn onto a cooling rack and remove the baking parchment.

This is a high protein bread, thanks to the combination of the egg and the chickpea flour.  Using my copy of Eat Well and Keep Healthy (Macdonald, London, a million years ago) given to me by my Mum when I was 18 (which IS a million years ago) I estimate that each slice of bread, weighing in at 50g, contains 8g of protein. That’s more than three times as much as in a slice of normal bread, and about the same, gram for gram, as white fish.

*Yes. I'm joking.