This recipe for soft and tender Weight Watchers gluten free breadsticks is made with gluten free flour, baking powder, salt, and Greek yogurt, but tastes like yeast bread.
Weight Watchers (WW) Style, but that's just an aside
I guess Weight Watchers is now WW? Whether you care about the “program” or not, you have to try these soft gluten free breadsticks. It's my third recipe in the “2-ingredient dough” style, and at this point it's just a great super quick backpocket recipe to have. Weight Watchers who?
If you haven't heard of this dough, it's called “2-ingredient” dough because it was originally developed to be made with self-rising flour (which is just all purpose flour + baking powder + salt) and 0% fat (nonfat) Greek-style plain yogurt. The plain Greek yogurt creates an amazing yeasty-tasting tang, and magically tender bread of many kinds.
I started out with “2-ingredient” gluten free bagels and had to tweak the conventional recipe quite a bit to get it to work properly gluten free. Ever since then, my family and I have been hooked. I even made those bagels for my kids' friends, and they just thought they were eating “regular” mini bagels.
Next came WW-style gluten free pizza, and I quickly learned that the recipe had to be rebalanced for that endeavor because you needed a drier, less puffy dough. But when I tried using that pizza recipe to make these breadsticks, it was dry and hard as a rock.
Tips for working with this “2-ingredient” dough
This dough is quite easy to work with, and happily quite difficult to ruin. Even when you're working with conventional gluten-containing flour to make a similar recipe to this, you'll see on other blogs that the raw dough isn't smooth.
During shaping, the dough does tend to separate a bit from itself, creating cracks. I recommend kneading the dough to integrate it well after mixing, and then pinching the cracks together if they do form during shaping. Then, continue rolling and shaping it.
You really don't need a lot of additional flour to shape these rolls, though. If you do add way too much flour during shaping, you will end up with tough bread. That's always the case when working with bread dough.
As you might have guessed, the garlic butter you see me brushing on top isn't really Weight Watchers-friendly. But only 2 melted tablespoons are plenty to cover all 8 breadsticks.
Add some garlic salt and you'll swear you were eating my yeasted Olive Garden-style gluten free soft breadsticks. Those are the stuff that dreams are made of! ?
Ingredients and substitutions
As with the other “2-ingredient bread” dough WW-style recipes, there are so few ingredients this recipe that substitutions can make a big difference (and often not for the better). But here's what I know (or am willing to guess):
Dairy-free: I haven't tried this recipe with nondairy plain yogurt, such as So Delicious brand, but I have tried the other 2-ingredient WW-style bread recipes on the blog with it and was successful.
Take a look at the ingredients and substitutions section of my recipe for Weight Watchers Gluten Free bagel recipe for all the information I have about making these sort of recipes with nondairy (non-Greek-style) plain yogurt.
The butter in this recipe is truly optional and can either be replaced with Earth Balance buttery sticks (melted) or just omitted entirely.
Egg-free: When I was developing this recipe, I originally tried it without egg whites (and used water help bring the dough together). Even though egg whites are typically drying in baking, the breadsticks were significantly drier when I used water instead of eggs—because I had to bake the rolls longer before they were baked through.
When I added the egg whites, the bread had more lift (egg whites add a lot of structure), and baked more quickly, resulting in a much better texture. You can try replacing the egg whites with aquafaba (the liquid in the bottom of a can of chickpeas), but I would not replace them with water. If you decide to try, please report back about how it went!
WW Points: Each of these rolls has a bit over 3 SmartPoints each, as I calculated it using Better Batter gluten free flour ingredients—if you omit the melted butter (sorry! WW hates fat). That's about 1 point more than the bagels.
If you're just sort of eating WW-style, or you just love the idea of a yeast-free gluten free breadstick, add the butter. It makes everything better.
Sugar: I like to add a tiny bit of granulated sugar to this recipe. It does not make the breadsticks taste sweet. It just cuts the tang of the yogurt taste a bit and balances everything. It is truly optional.