Gluten-free Gourmand

I gave up on producing a showy loaf a long time ago.  I always rolled my eyes a little when I saw photos online of perfect bloom or wide-open crumb.  "The mustard is going to just fall right through," I would think to my self disapprovingly, shaking my head a little. It turns out, I was just jealous. After a decade of gluten-free bread baking and recipe development, and through a collaboration with some other bakers, I've come up with a gf sourdough bread recipe that produces an open crumb, a large bloom, and sometimes, if I'm lucky, an ear.   The bread has a very mild, pleasant sourdough flavor and is very light in color. The crumb is very open but not too delicate.  It has a chewiness to the texture that I associate with a good sourdough bread.  The crust gets a nice browning and it toasts up nicely. And I don't mind the mustard falling through as much as I thought I would. Many thanks to Michael Hollesen who came up with the original version of this recipe.  We

The traditional way to create a starter can take a few weeks to a month to have a usable culture. A science-minded professional baker, Ian Lowe of Apiece Bakery, has figured out a way to accelerate the process to have a viable and very beautiful tasting culture in just 3-7 days. Using heat and hydration it’s possible to speed up the fermentation to get through the “bad bacteria” phase in just 48 hours, leaving you a usable culture on the third day with some luck. I created my starter on a Tuesday and I baked with it on that Friday with great results. I first came across this method in a post on The Fresh Loaf by the contributor Ars Pistorica, AKA Ian Lowe. I’ve been using this method ever since I first read about it in 2013. He used whole wheat and/or rye, but says the method can be used with "any cereal, pseudo-cereal, or tuber flours." It’s not the only way to accelerate the first stages of creating a starter, but this is how I’ve adapted this method to various gluten