Gluten-Free Sourdough Baking: The Miracle Method for Creating Great Bread Without Wheat

Gluten‑Free Sourdough Baking: The Miracle Method is a fantastic guide for anyone wanting to bake great sourdough without wheat. The book offers great instructions that break everything down step by step, making it surprisingly easy to create delicious, gluten‑free sourdough bread at home. The method is approachable, the explanations are clear, and the results turn out far better than most gluten‑free recipes out there. A wonderful resource if you want gluten‑free bread with real sourdough flavor and texture.

I love this gluten free sourdough cookbook so much. Having never been a baker, I started experimenting with gluten free sourdough a few weeks before getting it, so I simplify these recipes a bit. (I just keep feeding my little jar of sourdough when taking it out of the fridge a day before making bread, and do not do the discard starter, or make separate levians. I usually mix and shape my dough before heading to bed, and leave it out to proof overnight in my cool house (in the 60s *F), before baking it in the morning/afternoon.) The book does use like 10 different gluten free flours, so I have definitely been frequenting my local coop much more to get them. But the breads and all of the baked goods come out soo good... And between the whole grain flours, sourdough, psyllium husk, flex seed and very moderate amount of sugar for the sweets recipes, all of this stuff is actually really nutritious and good for you! It is so wonderful for a gf person to be excited about baking, and even my very much non-gluten free hubby likes them. So many wonderful recipes to play with... Big, big thank you to the writer! This book brings me so much joy.

If I could give this cookbook 10 stars, I would! I became familiar with gluten free bread-making over the last 3 years, so I already had all of the flours on hand recommended in this book (I buy from everything Anthony's Goods on Amazon). I purchased the Emile Henry cloche and the Weck glass jars she uses and recommends, and they have both been worthy purchases. What I LOVE about this cookbook - 1. The author is very thorough in her instructions. I had never made sourdough before, even when I ate gluten. And other than my 3 years of gluten free bread-making, I have very little bread-making experience. However, EVERY single recipe has been a hit! We have tried and LOVE - cauliflower pizza crust, beginner sourdough loaf, classic loaf, buckwheat and rosemary loaf, roasted garlic and olive loaf, rustic honey and oat loaf, same day baguette, pie crust (just tried this last week for Thanksgiving and it did not fail!), lemon challah, sesame dinner rolls, ciabatta buns, easy bagels, blueberry and apple muffins, date and orange scones, and herbed breadsticks. 2. I love the recommendations she made for products as well as whether to buy or mill your own flours and the difference between the two (I both buy and mill depending on what's available from my chosen brand.) This made purchases sooo simplified, as I was able to have a starting point to research the best products and price points without overwhelm. 3. Gorgeous photos that DON'T LIE! More often than not, when you find a GF bread recipe (especially online), the image is of a glutinous bread and the real thing looks nothing like what you were expecting. However, every single item has come out looking pretty close / resembling the picture. It's such a confidence builder! 4. While some of the instructions seem repetitive, she did not assume the baker would know that and she spells it all out clearly, over and over again, so that wherever in the book you begin your baking, you have a full set of thorough instructions detailing every temperature, timeline, and bread preparation instructions. 5. EVERYTHING we've tried has turned out DELICIOUS! I have friends and colleagues asking me to make them loaves after trying mine. I don't think I've ever had so much success with a cookbook in the history of my life, and I've been cooking for 30ish years! 6. Everything freezes well! I've even frozen a whole loaf before, thawed out in the fridge for a day or two before I needed it, and it tasted fresh baked. Simple, simple, simple for my busy lifestyle, and now we always have bread on hand! Where I needed some help - only 1 place - and that was with the discard! It wasn't immediately clear to me how to store the discard. In the fridge, yes, but tightly closed with the jar's glass lid? With the loose fitting cloth? It took some trial and error, and some research, but I figured it out (with the jar's glass lid). I put some masking tape with the date I first started it and out 1 month, because I've found that after about a month-to-5-weeks the starter gets too sour and my kids don't like the flavor of the finished products. I do my best to use it all within that time. All in all, this has been a wonderful journey of trial and error, and experimentation. There is a definite learning curve if you're unfamiliar with gluten free baking. It can be quite expensive, as well, if you don't already own some of the flours and products for making the loaves. However, I've found stuff on sale and have made the purchases worth it by actually using the products. I 150% recommend this book!

I purchased this as a gift for my sister. She absolutely loves baking bread with sourdough. Recently her son-in-law just discovered he has celiac and cannot eat gluten. My sister is extraordinarily careful about taking care of him because she cooks for them all the time. So this was a perfect gift for her. She was so happy to receive it so she can continue her sourdough baking without worrying about her son-in-law. She loves the recipes!

Sour dough is quite a science and gluten free compounds the challenge.

When others were getting into sourdough during the pandemic, I held off, as I'm gluten-free. I decided to find some GF starter and give it a whirl, thinking I could just substitute some beloved GF flour mixes for regular flour. NOPE. Bread has a whole complicated chemistry going on. So I got this book to figure things out. Yes, as other reviewers have pointed out, it takes quite a collection of flours and other ingredients to make these recipes. But it is totally worth it. I have made the Beginner's Loaf a few times and the Artisan Loaf once, and even with minor mistakes they were better than any GF sourdough I've ever had. And I live in an area with great GF bakeries and have mail ordered GF sourdough from around the country. These recipes are IT. The author has clearly done a lot of painstaking work to get the flavors and textures right. I cannot wait to wade in further and try the cibatta rolls, the baguettes, and the dinner rolls. She even has a few recipes for using discarded starter. I'm really glad I found this book. It's going to be my GF sourdough bible. Her instructions are clear, and the information at the beginning of the book is vital to doing this right, so don't skip straight to the recipes.

I am very happy with this purchase! I am very new to sourdough baking. Initially I did feel like a chemist with multiple ingredients and timings. However, I eventually started to understand the concepts of proofing. Good healthy flour mixes; not cardboard bread. I recommend a good strong starter (mine is only brown rice) for these breads. I am working my way through this recipe book.

I really like the theory with as little starch & sugar as needed for healthier for you sourdough. However, after following the book to feed my starter 50/50 b.rice & buckwheat the recipes i made were too strong sourdough flavor. (Like I threw them away! And I never do that!) As the only gf sourdough book I could find, I wouldn't throw it out but use the recipes as guides when I am more knowledgeable to tweak them. The book is very informative and I would recommend it to sourdough novices, just take the recipes with a grain of salt.

This author changed my gluten-free vegan sourdough baking GAME! The recipes are easy to follow, easy to vegan-ize, easy to be a baking rock star AND the author actually responds on IG if you have a smart question!

Good book, I gave it away however, before I used it to someone who needed it more.

My partner absolutely loves it

Excellent book for beginners or seasoned sourdough bakers.

I decided I wanted to bake some gluten free bread that didn’t taste of cardboard. Having tried various gluten free recipes & been disappointed gluten free sourdough sounded like a good idea. As I already had most of the different flours & ingredients,I didn’t need to buy much- that is something people need to consider as the ingredients are not cheap & although there is a section on discarded starter, there is still a certain amount of wastage. I bought this book & followed the instructions to the letter. I weighed every ingredient carefully, checked the temperature of the water, the fridge & the oven. The starter & levain were bubbling nicely. I have a proofing oven to ensure the proofing was done correctly. So I was hoping for a decent loaf. Sadly, the first few were like house bricks. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. For me, this is where the book is lacking, there is very little guidance if the bread does not turn out well. Fortunately I had also bought The Sourdough School so I had some idea of the process. Vanessa Kimble tells you that every kitchen, every starter & every levain will be different. Also, different flours behave in different ways, so I then just started using the recipes in the book but doing my own thing rather than following her instructions. I never leave my loaf overnight, I have found that it doesn’t work for me. The beginners loaf has never been great, the classic loaf (the photo) is so much better. The seasame dinner rolls are lovely, as is the roasted garlic & olive bread. However I haven’t always found the instructions crystal clear, sometimes it feels as if bits have been missed out. I am sure it’s because the author knows exactly what she is doing but to a novice, it can be confusing. Most of the recipes I have tried make a really good loaf, much much better than anything I’ve made or bought before. I use the recipes for ingredients but I have had to adapt the method to get (what I consider to be) a palatable loaf of bread. Just a tip, if, like me you don’t have a tea towel stiff enough to make peaks (for the bread rolls) roll up 3 other tea towels & put them underneath (as in photo) this creates troughs that don’t collapse. I have also found the bread rolls bake just as well on a baking tray as on a pizza stone.