Rice bread

Chris says: “I created this recipe when panic buying meant that home bakers in particular were finding it hard to buy flour, and I was finding ways for them to eke out their dwindling supply. Tastes great when made from pilau rice leftover from the previous night’s Indian takeaway meal.”

PS - If you have created a gluten-free recipe for Real Bread (ie no xanthan gum, additives, baking powder etc.) made with rice or rice flour that you’d be happy for us to publish, please email it to us.

This recipe was published in April 2020 as part of the Real Bread Campaign's #LockdownLoafers initiative.

Ingredients

Makes one medium (about 650g) loaf

300g Bread flour
300g Cooked basmati (or other long grain) rice*
200-250g Water straight from the tap, depending on how confident you are working with sticky dough
6g Salt (about one level 5ml teaspoon)
5g Fresh (or 1tsp quick**) yeast

*There’s no hard and fast rule of how much raw rice you need to produce a given weight when cooked. It tends to triple or quadruple, so you’d probably need about 75-100g of raw rice if boiling just for this recipe. Add about half a teaspoon of salt to the cooking water, or the rice (and, therefore, the bread) will be really bland.

**Read the label and avoid those that contain any additives.

Method

Basically: Mix, leave, stretch every now and then, shape, bake.

Weigh the water in a bowl and stir in the salt and yeast (no, the yeast won’t die) until dispersed.

Mix in the flour and cooked rice. No need to knead – you can stop once you have a shaggy dough but there’s no dry flour left.

Cover the bowl (eg with a carrier bag that you can reuse again and again) and leave to rest for half an hour or so.

Scoop the dough out of the bowl with a wetted dough scraper, or your hand, stretch it and fold it in half, then repeat this action. You can find videos demonstrating how on t’internet. Place the dough back in the bowl and cover again.

Leave at room temperature to prove/rise. Depending on what temperature your room is (mine was about 19-20°C when I did tests of this bread) this might be seven or eight hours. During this time, repeat the stretch’n’fold action every now and then. You could do it hourly or every other hour, but doesn’t have to be that often.

Shape the dough however you like eg for an oiled tin, banneton, or free-standing on an oiled baking tray. Again, the intermesh is full of how-to videos. Cover and leave for two or three hours until it’s fully risen.

Heat the oven (with a baking stone or tray in place if you’re proving dough in a banneton) to about 220°C.

Turn out the dough if proved in a banneton, dust the top with flour, if you like, and/or slash it with a lame/grignette or murderously sharp knife and put straight into the oven.

Bake for about 45 minutes to an hour. Turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool before slicing – bread (particularly this one with all that starchy rice) can be gummy and also lose a lot of moisture if you cut when hot.

Substitutions

In answer any ‘can I…’ questions about swapping or adding ingredients, the answer is yes, you can. Every tweak creates a different recipe that will give you different results. Seek out those recipes or experiment for yourself and, if you come up with a bread you love, please share it and your tips!

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Recipe © Chris Young / The Real Bread Campaign

Reproduction prohibited without written permission of the copyright holder.

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Social sharing

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