Bread – Does leavened bread made with yeast require gluten to rise

breadyeast

I want to understand which flours can and can't be used with yeast to get a rise for baking bread. From what I understand, yeast consumes sugar and produces carbon dioxide, which gets trapped inside the dough and causes it to expand during proving.

Does gluten have any special properties for trapping carbon dioxide that make it uniquely capable of trapping CO2 or can I perform this process with a variety of flours?

Flours I'm interested in are soy flour, defatted peanut flour, brown rice flour,
dark rye flour, chickpea flour, sorghum flour, oat flour, and several varieties of corn flour.

Best Answer

Yes, rising is very dependent on gluten. In almost all cases, you won't get any rising without a gluten-rich flour. Even if you use wheat flour, but one that has the wrong proportion of gluten, you will get a disappointing rise. If you were to try making a bread recipe calling for AP flour (8-10% gluten) with bagel flour (14-15% gluten) or a recipe for bread flour (12ish percent gluten) with pastry flour (6% gluten), one prominent problem will be very little rising.

I said "in almost all cases" and not "in all", because some clever people have found limited ways to get rising without gluten. The limitations of such baking are:

  • you can't achieve most traditional bread textures with this kind of baking. You only get bread that resembles the cottony, light bread with soft crust that is the prototypical bread in an American supermarket.
  • you can't use any gluten-free flour. What you need is a flour that is almost pure starch. Rice flour can be used to make a gluten free bread recipe, defatted peanut flour won't work well.
  • You have to use something to replace the gluten, typically a combination of thickeners like guar gum.
  • It is a very finicky process. Making up your own recipes by experimentation will have an immense failure rate. Instead, you should follow existing recipes to the letter, and live with the fact that you will need quite some exercise to learn to execute them well, if the recipe was any good to start with.

So, if you manage your expectations and invest some time in choosing and learning a good recipe, you can get risen gluten-free bread of a certain type. In that sense, yeast bread doesn't strictly "require" gluten to rise, but for most practical purposes, the answer is quite close to "yes it does".

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