Yet another project to fill my time in retirement was to explore the art of gluten-free sourdough baking. Some people think that regular sourdough bread is gluten-free, but it’s not. You need to have a special sourdough starter that contains some kind of gluten-free flour, like brown rice.

A few months before I retired, I happened upon just such a starter at a local mercantile. It was made by the Cultures for Health company (but you can get it via mail, also). Not long after my retirement last spring, I began to experiment with it.

So far, I’ve made two kinds of gluten-free sourdough pancakes (one was buckwheat blueberry, the other whole grain), bread, and a chocolate-coffee cake with chocolate-coffee frosting.

Of those, the pancakes and the cake were delectable winners! I’m still perfecting the bread recipe. I have a hard time getting the dough to rise enough before baking. I suspect the cold climate I live in is one reason for this. Sourdough bacteria like a nice, warm environment. I’ve begun adding some regular yeast to the bread dough, but I think I need to add even more. We’re not huge bread eaters in our household, so this could be a long process.

I’ve also learned how to refrigerate the starter and how to revive it from a frozen state. I freeze it when we’re gone on long trips, otherwise it wouldn’t survive not being fed with new brown rice flour and spring water every 3-4 days.

That’s another thing about sourdough starter, you can’t just use water from the tap. It has chlorine in it, so you need to use spring water, which can be found in most grocery stores. Another secret is to heat the water before adding it to the starter. I’ve had good luck heating it to 80-90 degrees F in the microwave, which makes the starter activate more quickly. You can tell your starter is activated when it gets a lot of bubbles and it almost doubles in size.

I got the pancake and bread recipes from the Cultures for Health website. The cake recipe came from the gluten-free cookbook, Cannelle et Vanille Bakes Simple by Aran Goyoaga that I bought at The Lost Kitchen store in Maine.

Learning a new cooking technique has been fun! Are you stretching your culinary skills in some way?