Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Homemade Wonderful Bread Mix Product Review

Many people are opting for a gluten-free diet due to health concerns such as allergies and celiac disease. It seems that this way of cooking has come a long way in the last few years. There have been gluten-free bread mixes for quite some time but there are even more now as well as many other resources on the internet with recipes.

I don't have the health concerns that require a gluten-free diet but I do enjoy trying out different foods. I have been wanting to try gluten-free baking since I like baking with regular flour.

I decided before I spent the cash on larger amounts of the individual components in some of the mixes to bake with that I would try Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Homemade Wonderful Bread Mix to see if I actually like this kind of bread and baking.

If you're new to gluten-free cooking, you may be wondering how you can bake a loaf of bread without white or wheat flour. There are many alternatives including almond and rice flour but also garbanzo bean flour which is the top-listed ingredient in this mix.

For those who want to know the exact ingredients because of allergy concerns, here is the list of ingredients from the package:

• Garbanzo bean (aka chickpeas) flour
• Potato starch
• Corn starch
• Whole grain sorghum flour
• Tapioca flour
• Evaporated cane juice
• Fava bean flour
• Xanthan Gum
• Active dry yeast
• Potato flour
• Sea salt (magnesium carbonate)
• Guar gum
• Soy lecithin

For those concerned about other allergies, the package also states that it's manufactured in a facility that uses tree nuts and soy. You will need to provide your own milk, egg, egg whites, butter or vegetable oil, and cider vinegar. The instructions state you can use substitutes for the egg and milk such as soy milk if you want to make this vegan. I used regular milk and eggs.

There are two options for mixing and baking, either the traditional way or in a bread machine. I do have an older bread machine but wanted to try this by hand first. The instructions state to use a heavy-duty table-top mixer which I don't have, so I used the largest bowl I had and a hand mixer. Some of the mix still escaped from the bowl. Next time, I will allow my bread machine to mix all the ingredients and I'll take it out to rise as usual as I prefer oven-baked bread.

When all the ingredients are mixed it sort of looks like and has the texture of a thick batter. This bread has only one rising right in the pan for about 35 minutes. I found it to rise quite well. The baking time of 60-65 minutes was just right. I was a little nervous about how this bread would turn out since the batter looked strange to me. It did produce a funny-looking loaf of bread but I wasn't disappointed with the taste.

I conducted a few taste tests with this bread to see how well it would stand up next to regular bread. Here are my results.

After Cooling Off

I let the bread cool completely on a rack before slicing. It almost had the texture of a bakery white bread (not the Wonder Bread type) and tasted good. I confess it's not as tasty as regular bread to me.

Toast and Sandwich Test

My main reason for making bread is to use for my breakfast toast. This bread passed the test and toasted up well. It did seem to absorb jam much more than regular bread though. It does make good sandwiches but next time I will cut the slices thinner because it's a dense bread and very filling.

One-Week Test

I didn't refrigerate the loaf because I wanted to see how long it would last before going moldy. It was about 5-6 days.

Freeze Test

I froze a few slices to test how they would thaw and toast the following week. This bread passed this test with flying colors.

I've seen other reviews that state that the taste of beans from the bean flour is really strong. I didn't get that sense at all, though it does seem to be missing a certain oomph maybe because I'm not used to cooking this way yet.

This won't be a regular bread I make but it has gotten me interested in more gluten-free recipes. I would like to experiment more with garbanzo bean flour and maybe even try almond flour. If I were forced to be on a gluten-free diet though, this would be a mix I'd keep on hand for convenience.