Gluten-Free Pantry French Bread

There's a Gluten-Free Goddess recipe for sweet banana crumpets that I want to try to make at some point. When I was at Nature's Pavilion last month (or the month before...whenever that was...) I bought a box of Gluten-Free Pantry's French Bread and Pizza Mix thinking that was what the crumpets recipe called for. It wasn't. So, the box sat in the pantry for a few weeks.

Then, one day, the box provided a needed shortcut in making a loaf of sandwich bread. (Either I was missing ingredients to make my usual loaf or I was feeling enervated by hormones or the dullness of routine, I can't remember the exact circumstances.)

This first loaf was close to inedible for me, but the rest of the fam liked it.

While doing the weekly food shopping the week after I made the first loaf, I noticed that the mix was on sale, buy one get one free. So I bought another box and a box of the muffin and scone mix (for those banana crumpets).

One of my strengths as a learner is that I revise well, and easily. I had found the first loaf on the dry side so I boosted the liquids in the second loaf: more water, more oil, and bigger eggs (I had my wonderful pastured eggs on hand). I was out of safflower oil so I used olive oil for this loaf.

The second loaf was delicious. Really yummy. The unbelievable egg yolks gave this loaf a warm yellow color. And the olive oil masked the flavor that really turned me off of the first loaf (likely the xanthan gum).

Which brings us to this week. I still haven't made the crumpets, but I did put two more boxes of this bread mix on the shopping list. It's a great pantry item to have handy. It's cheaper than a store bought loaf of GFCF bread and much tastier.

The loaf I made Monday morning was gone by Monday night. This morning, I made another loaf. I had both the rice cooker and the bread machine going within 15 minutes or so. There was warm rice available for breakfast and sandwiches on soft, fresh bread for lunch. Yum.