Light, tender and soft, with a soft crust, this gluten free English muffin bread is the easy white sandwich bread you’ve been searching for!
If you’ve been thinking of baking some gluten free bread, and you’re not sure where to begin, may I make a suggestion? Start with this recipe. There’s no real shaping, as it’s a batter dough by nature.
Plus there’s no long refrigerator rise, so in just a couple hours you’re ready to slice into a nice warm loaf of fresh bread. Only a few minutes of that time are even active. Before you begin, try reading my top 10 secrets to baking the best gluten free bread. Then see for yourself in this how-to video:
There are plenty of gluten free bread recipes on this website. And I even wrote a whole book about gluten free bread. When I was trying to select the first of those sandwich bread recipes to do a how-to video for, this one was an easy choice.
Not because it’s a difficult recipe. Instead, the fact that it’s maybe the easiest recipe is the whole point!
This gluten free English muffin bread is an interesting example of yeast bread: it is a very wet dough that you don’t really shape in the “traditional” sense. But that’s not because it’s gluten free.
That’s because of the nature of English Muffin Bread. It’s a super wet yeast dough, and moisture makes it double fast. Then, all that’s left is to scrape it into a loaf pan, smooth the top, cover it and let it rise.
After just about 35 minutes in the oven, you’ll have an amazing loaf of soft and tender gluten free bread. To store it, slice it thickly (because it’s amazing that way!), and place a small piece of parchment or waxed paper between each slice and the next before bagging and freezing.
This is good practice with any bread that is high in moisture like this one, so the slices don’t stick to one another as they freeze. It’s not necessary with most of the other breads, though.
If you need to be dairy free, there is a version of this bread recipe that does not use my bread flour formula, and can easily be made with dairy-free milk, in my first cookbook, Gluten Free on a Shoestring (page 106).
A while back, I asked those of you on my (free!) email list a simple question: When it comes to gluten free baking, what’s your biggest struggle? Among the hundreds of responses, a few themes emerged.
One of those themes was about your struggles with gluten free bread. And, like in conventional bread baking, the problem was most often with getting the bread to rise properly. It can be so frustrating!
Baking yeast bread is very environment-dependent. So when I bake bread in the wintertime, it takes a bit longer to rise since the air is not only a bit colder, but quite a bit drier. If you live in a very dry climate year-round, you may even have to add a bit more moisture to your bread dough.
One of the most common problems with baking bread in general (and a big part of my Bread FAQs) is dough that has dried out. If you let it rise without covering it, the dough will lose too much moisture and won’t rise properly.
This gluten free English muffin bread is by nature a very wet dough. So not only does it rise quickly, but it will rise even in a drier environment. It’s still possible to dry it out enough that it won’t rise, but there’s a bigger margin for error. That’s like rising insurance!
HELLO! I’m Nicole! I make gluten-free food enjoyable & affordable. If they can make it with gluten, we can make it without. That’s a promise!
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I was wondering if doubling your yellow cake recipe would be appropriate for a half sheet pan?
Feel free to experiment, Pamela. I have only made that recipe as indicated in the instructions.
Hi Nicole, I need your help desperately! My English muffin bread didn’t turn out very good(><)
It was very dense and the bread didn't rise much….. this happened to me with other bread I baked. I used GF bread flour as you described but I use sea salt because I didn't have kosher salt. First rise was successful but not second rise. Don't know why my bread was densed (this happened to me in the past). I love your books and want to try other bread recipes but i am bit discouraged….If you have any suggestions, much appreciated! Thank you
Hi, Yoko,
If you made ingredient substitutions, I would also start there first. If your bread rose in the initial rise, but didn’t in a subsequent rise, that likely means that you left it exposed and it dried out. Please see my Bread FAQs for more information, especially numbers 7, 20 and 21: https://glutenfreeonashoestring.com/about/gluten-free-bread-troubleshooting-faqs/
Just reading through this and saw that you “put it in a cold oven, set the temperature, set the timer and waited 35 minutes”. The oven should be preheated. If you haven’t tried again, try preheating!
I saw in an older post that someone stated that there is no Expandex in Canada. That is not true because I bought Expandex from a company at http://www.qualifirst.com which has an office in Eastern Canada and also Western Canada.
Hello Nicole,
What actually is Expandex?? Never heard of it here in Australia;-)
Kr
Miriam
Hi, Miriam,
Please see the Resources page on the blog for a description of Expandex, including tips on where/how to find it outside the U.S. I will also add that link to the recipe (which I thought I already had, and usually do in my bread flour recipes!).
So sorry I did not read all the comments and answers…..you covered my question farther down the blog :)
Will get busy with the almond milk Thanks
Beth, this recipe calls for my GF bread flour blend, which calls for whey protein isolate, a dairy product. As I state in the text of the post, if you’d like a dairy-free version of English Muffin Bread, I’m afraid you will need my first cookbook, as there is another recipe in there that can easily be made dairy free, without my bread flour blend.