Look, nobody *likes* gluten-free food. It’s a necessary evil for some, and there’s a whole conversation about how many people actually need to be eating it. Which I am absolutely swerving here today! Instead, today I’m going to tell you about the scientists who were so desperate to create edible gluten-free baked goods that they electrocuted their dough like it was Frankenstein’s monster.
Bread is apparently the most difficult food to make without gluten. You may have had experiences with GF breadstuffs, but if not, let the people of LWON tell you. “I have eaten gluten-free muffins twice,” says Ann. “The first time because they had stuff in them that I liked, the second time because I couldn’t believe they would be that bad. But they were. They really are not food, they are muffin-shaped despair.” Okay so muffins are out, but what about bread? “I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to try any other gluten free food.”
“I have tried gluten-free bread,” volunteers Jennifer. “No taste, texture all wrong, sand and rubble wrapped in a hand towel, nothing really good about it.”
“Gluten-free bread is super good in relation to eating cardboard,” says Erik, a self-described “glutard” (their word, not mine). “But it’s not so good when compared to actual bread.” This may explain why, he says, “we glutards swap our favorite bread brands like rare baseball cards. Because deep down we are all under the delusion that we might find one that doesn’t suck.”
Why is it so hard to make bread taste okay without gluten? Apparently it’s all down to the dough – instead of the robust, doughy stressballs you may have seen on Bread Instagram, your gluten-free dough requires about twice as much water. Put that in a conventional oven, and the chemisty doesn’t quite work. The oven’s heat bakes the big stressballs from the outside in; by the time the heat has penetrated the innermost core of a sourdough to create a fluffy sponge, it has also created a beautiful crunchy crust on the outside.
Not so for the glutenless glurge. All that extra water means it takes twice as long to bake. By the time you’re done the resulting bread is harder and denser than regular bread. There’s no crust. All factors that contributed to Ann’s “despair”.
But what if, instead of baking your bread, you electrocuted it? That may sound extreme to you, but spare a thought for poor Erik. Henry Jäger and his colleagues at the Institute of Food Technology – which is part of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna – decided to give it a try.
They used an approach called Ohmic heating. Instead an oven and a pan, this uses a generator that supplies electrical energy to a special pan with two stainless steel electrode plates at either end. These treat the dough you put between them like the filament of a light bulb – coursing current through it from one electrode to the other. Your basic lightbulb operates at 60 watts. The Ohmic heating system sends 2-6 kilowatts of power through the bread dough – about 100 times what you need for the lightbulb. (This article in Popular Mechanics is good if you’re interested in the engineering.) Ohmic baking doesn’t gently radiate heat from the outside of the dough to the inside. It violently electrocutes every bit of it all at once.
Therefore, as you might expect, electrocuting your bread takes far less time than baking it – after some finagling, Jäger and his team alighted on the perfect recipe: first you fry it for 15 seconds at its maximum of 2-6 kW, then downgrade the power to 1 kW for 10 seconds, and then finish with a 0.3 kW infusion for five minutes.
Dough to bread in 5 minutes and 30 seconds!
But what did it taste like? They did a taste test. “Gluten free bread obtained from ohmic baking has a larger volume and is more porous,” Jäger says. “It has a more elastic crumb and a better mouthfeel compared to conventional baking. The taste of the crumb is similar to real bread.” The only thing that is still missing is the crust.
I can’t confirm these results, short of travelling to Vienna. I can’t retrofit my standard oven either. So we’ll have to take his word for it.
But in the future, it should be straightforward to make specialised appliances for us all to try at home. “The whole system can be designed to the size of a standard oven,” says Jäger. Best of all, he says this won’t just improve gluten-free bread – an Ohmic heating system would also work for cakes, pies – even Ann’s despair-inducing muffins might be salvaged. The crust issue could be resolved with a two-step baking process that zaps the bread first and then subjects it to infrared heating.
Replication studies will have to be done in order to know if these scientists have cracked the code of decent gluten-free bread. Erik will be thrilled! While we wait, another source tells me Jamie Oliver seems to have figured out a way to do nice gluten free-bread. And if it’s cakes you’re after, you’re already covered in that department. “Oh no, there are definitely good gluten-free cakes,” says Helen. “They are basically fudge masquerading as cake.”
Photo credit:
Found art on Reddit. User: JPTawok
Unusual note: Thanks to LWON reader Dr. D for noticing the weird awfulness of the previous art (in my defense, it’s really hard to find a photo to illustrate electrocuting bread) and then finding a better picture for me to use!
More information
Denisse Bender et al. Ohmic Heating—a Novel Approach for Gluten-Free Bread Baking, Food and Bioprocess Technology (2019). DOI: 10.1007/s11947-019-02324-9