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All-Purpose Gluten-Free Sourdough Bread Dough
continued from Part 1 ~ Gluten-Free Sourdough Starter.
By Tara Barker
Originally published in Issue 12::BREAD.
Yields 6-8 bagels. This dough also works nicely for a traditional boule or as pizza dough. Recipe may be doubled.
A note on the method of measuring: As a pastry chef and recipe developer, I only work in grams. Measuring by weight instead of volume is far more accurate and allows for very small adjustments to be made to recipes, which is crucial when I’m working on gluten-free recipes, especially ones for baked goods (which are basically a scientific process in the first place, gluten-free or not). If you do not have a scale, there are plenty of conversion calculators and charts available online to help you translate to the proper measurements.
Ingredients
125 grams non-chlorinated water, 100-115°F
25 grams honey
75 grams sweet white rice flour (regular white rice flour can be substituted)
50 grams tapioca starch
50 grams light buckwheat flour (I use Bouchard Family Farms Acadian buckwheat flour; darker varieties of buckwheat will yield a different result)
25 grams certified gluten-free oat flour (alternately, you can just grind gluten-free oats into a fine flour in a spice grinder)
8 grams powdered milk (optional)
6 grams psyllium husks
4 grams xanthan gum (alternately, you can leave the xanthan out and increase the psyllium, up to 12 grams total. Or you can use a mix of psyllium husks and ground chia seeds. It’s flexible, as long as you get a total of 10-12 grams of some binder in there.)
6 grams kosher salt
200 grams peak gluten-free sourdough starter (instructions in previous post)
1 large egg
30 grams olive oil
Instructions
- Combine the warm water and honey, and stir to dissolve honey. Set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, combine all the dry ingredients. Whisk to blend. Add the starter and whisk until it mixes with the dry ingredients to form large, dry crumbles.
- Add the egg and olive oil and mix until combined (it will still be dry and crumbly).
- With the mixer on low speed, gradually pour in the warm water/honey mixture, then increase mixer speed to medium-high and whisk for one minute to develop the dough’s structure. The dough will be very loose and runny now, really more batter than dough; don’t worry about it.
- Pour it into a lightly-oiled bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and leave it to rise.
I like to let my dough rise at room temperature for at least 6 hours, or overnight if I’m mixing the dough in the evening. At the end of that rise the dough should have almost doubled in size and will look visibly drier. At this point, it can go straight into the refrigerator for a long, slow ferment.
While I typically use my dough two to three days after first making it (letting it ferment in the fridge for eighteen to thirty hours), there have been times that I have left it in the fridge for almost five days before getting around to baking it, and it’s still wonderful. Definitely more tangy and complex in flavor, but that’s nothing I’d complain about. One upside is that all of the flour has had plenty of time to fully hydrate, and hence the dough is firm, pliable and perfectly knead-able, which is a fantastic feeling. Something to be aware of: the dough will “settle” as it sits in the fridge, and not be quite as inflated when you take it out as it was when you put it in. This is normal, and the dough will be given a chance to rise a little bit more before you bake it, so not to worry.
When you’re ready to bake, remove the dough from the refrigerator. Follow the instructions below for making bagels or modified for use as pizza dough or your favorite bread recipes. 
Bagels
- Remove your bowl of dough from the refrigerator. Allow it to sit, still covered, for half an hour on the counter, to take the chill off. Turn out the dough (which should now be quite firm and very definitely dough-like) onto a gluten-free floured board.
- Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces (or more or less, depending on how many bagels you want to make and how big you like your bagels). If you want to make sure your bagels are quite uniform in size, feel free to weigh out each portion of dough. I think 85 grams is a weight that results in a good-sized bagel.
- With lightly floured hands, roll each piece of dough into a rope about an inch in diameter. Bring the ends together and press and smoosh them to seal.
- Place each formed bagel on a parchment-lined baking pan. Once you have formed all the bagels, loosely cover the pan with a lint-free towel or plastic wrap, and allow them to sit at room temperature for 1-1½ hours, or until the bagels look puffy and feel slightly springier to the touch (you won’t get a very large rise out of the dough at this point).
- In a large pot, bring 8-10 cups of water plus 1 teaspoon of baking soda to a boil. Gently slide 2-3 bagels into the water at a time, however many you can easily fit in the pot without too much crowding. Boil the bagels on one side for 30 seconds, then carefully flip them over (I use a fish spatula for this) and boil an additional 30 seconds.
- Remove each bagel from the water (again, I like to use a fish spatula—the slots allow water to drain away) and place back on the parchment-lined pan.
- While they’re still damp, sprinkle each bagel with kosher salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, everything bagel topping—whatever you want! If you’re worried about your toppings not sticking to the bagels, go ahead and brush the surface of the bagels with beaten egg white before applying salt/seeds/etc. I’m usually not too picky about this part, but it can’t hurt to be too careful. Repeat the boiling/topping process with the remaining bagels.
