Why The Pan You Choose Matters So Much For Gluten-Free Bread

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Gluten-free baking can produce cakes and cookies that are every bit as delicious as the classics, but gluten-free bread is a special kind of challenge. While wheat flour is an important building block of most baked goods, mixtures of different gluten-free flours can often do a good job approximating it. In desserts such as pastries, you don't actually want to develop too much gluten, but most bread really, really needs gluten to be itself. It provides the binding that traps air bubbles and gives bread its rise, as well as the chewy and holey interior of things like a French baguette. So when making gluten-free bread, your loaf needs all the help it can get. That's why we reached out to an expert, pastry chef Alysha Dinatale at The Goddess and Grocer, to ask her about tips for gluten-free bread baking. She told us one of the biggest decisions you can make actually has to do with the pan.

Dinatale says that if you are baking gluten-free bread, you want a pan with high sides. As she explains, "a pan with higher sides to give gluten-free bread the support it needs to rise up rather than spread out." Gluten-free bread is still going to proof and rise, and then rise again in the oven, because it still utilizes yeast. It just has a harder time holding that shape before it finishes cooking, so giving gluten-free bread a surface to cling to as it rises is key.

Looking for a bread pan with high sides for your gluten-free bread will inevitably lead you to the Pullman loaf pan. These are the classic loaf pans that things like white sandwich bread are cooked in. In fact, some companies like King Arthur Bread even make gluten-free bread baking pans with extra-high sides exactly like Dinatale recommends. You can also buy a basically identical Pullman loaf pan straight from the same manufacturer King Arthur uses, USA Pans.

Aluminum pans like this are better for bread than other options like glass or ceramic because they conduct heat very well, which is also going to help your gluten-free bread rise. Even better are Pullman pans with lidded tops, which trap more heat and moisture around your loaf for a more even bake and better rise. Dinatale just warns about one thing, saying "a lighter-colored pan is best — gluten-free doughs brown faster, so a dark pan can scorch the outside before the inside is fully baked. It's all about balance."

Of course your gluten-free bread is also going to need the right flours to have the structure to rise in the pan. Even though they don't have gluten, high-protein gluten-free flours like sorghum, millet, and buckwheat will have better structure than lower-protein options like rice flour. With the assistance of a good Pullman pan for rising, your loaves of bread with barely even miss the gluten.