Heidi’s Huge-Hit Gluten-Free Buns  

These gluten-free buns are amazing, and I get asked for the recipe every single time I cook them for a retreat!  There are some variants at the bottom to make focaccia buns, garlic buns, or sweet cinnamon buns too.  Enjoy my darlings!

Takes 3 hours from start to finish but with minimal intervention.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup sugar 
• 1 Tbsp yeast
• 1 egg
• 3 Tbsp oil
• 1 tsp cider vinegar
• 2.75 cups total flour of your choice. (I use Bakel’s Gluten-Free Flour mix (2.5 cups) and almond meal (0.25 cups)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1.5 tsp gum (xanthan gum or guar gum)

Method

In 1 cup of warm water, add the sugar and yeast. Stir, put in a warm place to proof. After 15 minutes, mixture should have a good head on it, nice and frothy.

In a mixing bowl, whisk 1 egg, 3 Tbsp oil, 1 tsp cider vinegar. Add yeast mixture, whisk.

Add the flour, salt, gum. Mix it up with a wooden spoon. This doesn’t kneed like bread dough and will stick to everything.

Put it in a warm oven (off) for one hour to rise.

Baking paper is your friend here. Line a dish with it (I’ve been using spring form cheese-cake pans. Oil your hands. Use a spoon to scoop out the dough into your palms and form little buns out of it, patting and compressing them a little.  

Put the buns in a warm oven to rise again: one hour.

Bake at 190° (that’s 375°F) for about 45 minutes; when tops go golden brown and they sound hollow when you knock on the bottom of the tin, time to take them out. Can be served without resting but generally I let them sit for 5 minutes.  

Variations

In the step where you are forming them in your hands before they get put into their final form in the baking pan, you can coat them in a mixture of your choosing:

• Fresh/dried herbs and oil (lots of oil) (top with a sprinkling of rock salt)
• Minced garlic, oil, and salt
• For a sweet cinnamon roll version, when making the dough use 1/3 cup brown sugar (instead of 1/4 cup white sugar) and add 1 tbsp cinnamon. In the step where you’re forming them into the pan, coat them in a mixture of: 2 tbsp cinnamon, 1/3 cup brown sugar, melted butter or oil.