Yeast Snuck Into My Gluten-Free Waffle Mix ~ Maybe!

[beauregard]

Well, here's a new one on me. I made my usual waffle recipe:

• ½ c Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Biscuit and Baking mix + ½ c Bob's Red Mill Brown Rice Flour (sifted together)

• 1 c milk

• 1 egg

• 2 tblsp sunflower oil

• pinch salt

I put the mix in the fridge and left town for two days, and when I returned it had expanded so much in it's glass container that it forced up the top and spilled out about four oz of mix. It has never done that before. Made a waffle with it & it was delicious. I set the container on the counter and an hour later it had expanded even more, with bubbles, so I put the remaining mix in a bread pan and sat it on the stove top while the stove heated to 425º, and it expanded substantially more again. Cooked it for 30 minutes @ 425°, and out came a nicely risen, plump, and delicious loaf. And it looked great, to boot! (see attached photo).

I hadn't known that yeast can be used with rice flour to make bread, but an online search set me straight. So a possibility occurs to me: I had originally mixed in a few torn-up pieces of 3-day old bread with the waffle mix (just to see how it tasted), and I'm almost sure that some bits of bread were still in the mix that went into the fridge. Is it possible that this is the explanation?

And if so, it it generally true:

1) that only small amounts of yeast are needed for rice flour bread?

and

2) that a day or two in the fridge improves the rising of dough? One of the reasons I gave up, a few years ago, on baking bread was that my dough never rose the way it was supposed to, then collapsed when I transferred the dough to a bread pan or sheet.

[Chris Hennes]

What you are describing is very much like what you get in a technique such as Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (eG-friendly book link), where you add just a tiny pinch of yeast to a very wet bread dough and then give it a multi-day ferment in the fridge. It's a technique that yields some of the very best bread I've ever had.

[gfweb]

What's in the biscuit and baking mix?

[Shalmanese]

First of all, baked bread doesn't have any live yeast in it. It looks like you created an inadvertent sourdough. It's odd though that it's so active. Yeast should be mildly active at fridge temps but not enough to blow the lid off a container.

[slkinsey]

Bob's Gluten-Free Biscuit and Baking Mix includes both baking powder and baking soda.

[beauregard]

Thanks for your comments, everyone.

Well, the lid was just plastic, so it was more like lifted than blown off

Continuation of story: turns out the batter I used, which tasted so good as bread, had just tiny amounts of the bread in it . . . but this morning I made a waffle with the batter, from another container, in which I had put most of the bread, and this waffle tasted terrible, with an unpleasantly strong yeast taste.

Just for kicks, one of these days I'm going to sprinkle a minimal amount of yeast in the waffle batter and stick it in the fridge for a couple of days & see what happens