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My brown rice bread is not rising and I do not know if I am doing something wrong or if yeast does not work with brown rice flour.
I baked brown rice bread in the following way:
Any tips on how to make it rise without any wheat or other gluten products?
(I cannot eat any gluten, so I need a 100% gluten-free solution.)
I have been making a gluten free yogurt bread with the brown rice flour and haven't had any problems. You are going to need xanthan gum with any kind of gluten free mix you need.
With the other gluten free bread recipes I have in my book, they are all calling for a tsp of vinegar in addition to the dry yeast. Not sure if that helps with the rising, but my recipes have all come out exactly like the book says and haven't had a problem with them not rising. I just turn my stand mixer on HIGH and don't worry about kneading the bread.
I think that AtlasRN has a very good point. Not the vinegar, the pH of dough is OK for yeast and it creates their own acid anyway, but the stand mixer.
Leavened gluten-free breads are very new, and are always made with xanthan (or other stabilizer) and a mixer. Xanthan works differently from gluten. It is more of an emulsifier, not an elastic protein like gluten. So it needs good aeration, and the big air bubbles of the yeast probably just escape into the air. On the other hand, a mixer forces air into the dough (batter?) and these small bubbles stay there, bound to the batter by the xanthan. Actually, whipping air into the dough works with wheat based dough too, there was a pizza lab article on that. But in a gluten-free bread, it is probably the only way to aerate.
Xanthan gum is commonly used in many foods, and it should be available around the world. It isn't used much in home cooking, so you can't get it at the supermarket. It should be possible to buy it over the Internet, or offline at a restaurant supply store or at a health food store. If you can't find xanthan, take guar, they are practically interchangeable. I don't know which one is easier to find, but my local health food store has guar and no xanthan.
Both xanthan and guar are used in very small quantities, so don't worry if it looks expensive. You can buy a kilogram, and store it in a dry place for months. It will be enough for hundreds of loaves of bread, so it should be a good investition even if you have to order online from a foreign site and pay international shipping and import tax.
The important part is to combine xanthan and an electrical mixer. A fork won't force the amount of air needed into the dough. You don't need an expensive stand mixer, a small hand held mixer should work fine. If you don't have one, you can try using a whisk and whipping vigorously, as you would egg whites, but I think that it will take a very long time and be very hard, because the batter will be much heavier than egg whites. A mixer will make it easy.
