Scientists make gluten-free bread that tastes and looks like your regular loaf

They’re using rice flour but processing it in a way that gives it the consistency, the ‘bubble structure’ and the volume of standard bread. Although there are a few gluten-free options already available, the mass-produced loaves often don’t give the person the same experience of eating regular bread.

Wheat bread forms a flexible matrix that allows it to rise in the fermenting phase, but because rice flour doesn’t have this, the gluten-free loaf has never been able to emulate the same consistency or feel.

Researchers at Hiroshima University in Japan analysed the make-up of wheat flour to discover that it contains bubbles that are coated in undamaged starch particles in a ‘stone wall’ arrangement that aren’t in rice flour. These bubbles stop wheat bread from collapsing in the baking process.

But by processing rice flour differently, the researchers – who work for Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) – have successfully replicated the texture and taste of the wheat loaf, and without using gluten.

(Source: Food Science and Technology, 2017; 79: 632)

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