Fail: Rice Flour Bread

F-f-f-f-f-fail! Capital F.

There were multiple elements of absolute fail here. I tried to make a Japanese recipe for rice flour muffins, which I won't even include because it was such a flop. It was a simple recipe that called for nothing more than rice flour, baking powder, yogurt, honey, beans, and soy milk. Which, in hindsight, does actually sound terrible - but the picture looked nice and I just wanted it to work so badly!!

I imagine maybe it flopped because I used blueberry instead of sweet beans like the recipe called for, but I don't know. I don't feel like blueberries would make the recipe *that* much wetter. I also used more blueberries than the amount of beans it called for, but that also shouldn't have had such a severe effect. The muffins were completely unset in the center, even though I baked them for about triple the baking time it called for. I used foil cups, but my friends have had success with that so I doubt that was the problem.

Also, they were gritty (ew!) which I chalk up to the chalkiness (haha!) of the rice flour. I don't even know if I'm using the right kind of rice flour, maybe that's the problem. And I don't know what it is about these frozen blueberries I bought, but even though they were still frozen when I put them in the dough and even though I coated them with flour first, they STILL bled all over the place instantaneously. I can only imagine that this brand of frozen blueberries is totally loaded up with artificial coloring. Needless to say, pretty gross overall. They even tasted like baking powder, on top of everything. This may have been my biggest fail since coming to Japan.

The thing I hate most is that I spent over $5 on a handful of frozen blueberries, so you bet your ass I plucked out and ate each blueberry before throwing the muffins away! (But I digress, this blog is about my cooking trials, not my self-destructive quirks).

I had enough ingredients left over and enough frustration to fuel another baking attempt. This time I tried making a loaf instead of muffins, and with a little less liquid and raisins - something drier - rather than blueberries. I added too much vanilla, which was my first mistake, but it was also still fairly underdone and therefore tasted pretty bad. The top also got super crispy and began to split even though the center was underdone. The tricky thing was, my tester came out dry when I put it in, so rice flour must just not stick to things. This attempt was definitely more edible than the last, but still a grand failure I wouldn't serve to anyone. Well, at least this one was edible (to me only) when I toasted it.

Maybe I'll try a yeast bread with rice flour yet, but I'm giving up on the rice flour quick breads. I would not be surprised if such things were just not meant to be based on the contrast between the chalky gluten-free nature of rice flour and the moist richness of a quick bread. So much for my dream of becoming the patron saint of gluten-free baking!!