My gluten free rice sourdough :)

[redbauble@sh.itjust.works]

I will try to cross-post some of my baking pictures here to try and lively up this community :)

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/65628487

Hello everyone, first time poster on this community!

I think the context came out a tad too long, so TL;DR: this is gluten (and nickel) free bread made mostly from rice flour and starch. The recipe is my own, developed mostly from scratch for the past year or so. The starter is live, 2.5 years old, made from whole grain rice flour (more photos and info below).

A bit of context:
For a variety of reasons and food allergies/intolerances I've been eating gluten free for the past 5 years or thereabouts. I've always been deeply unsatisfied with commercial gluten free breads, especially since my mother used to bake a lot, even sourdough sometimes, and it was always stellar.

In an attempt to make some decent bread, a couple years ago I started my live sourdough made from whole grain rice fluor exclusively (it actually started from white rice flour, but whole grain has more proteins, so it rises better, and I find it has a better taste too).

The recipe is one I've been developing on my own for the past year or so, mostly because I needed something that was also nickel free (for allergies). I live in Italy and the GF offer here is stellar, but the only alternative I could find which suited my needs tasted waaay too sugary for my taste (which is a common issue in gf baked products I find, since sugar tends to be used both for rising and for giving the bread a nice caramelized color). GF products tend to replace wheat with mostly corn (tons of nickel) and/or potato starch (also tons of histamine as well, and I need to keep it in check). The flour mix I was using before was made mostly from those two alone, so I had to change it.

This is my first bake after a period away from home. I had dried and freezed my starter before leaving, then unfreezed it and started feeding it again a couple days before the bake.
I actually got the proportions for my recipe completely wrong this time, and added about 100g too much flour. Somehow the proportions worked out in the end, I didn't even need to change the hydratation.

After making the dough, I let it rise for ~1.5hrs outside the fridge (~35°), then 12hrs in the fridge, then a couple hours outside to let it reach room temp. I think the dough was a bit dry on the outside and it split during rising.
I cut it ~1cm deep in a ) shape along the border before baking. With my recipe the bread usually splits along the cut which didn't happen this time, but at a second look it mostly rised from the previous split.

The crust is very crunchy for a GF bread, not so much for a norml wheat bread. The crumb is a bit humid and gummy, probably because of too high hydratation.
The bubbles are some of the best I've even obtained, I'm definitely marking this accident as a happy one.

Would be really happy to contribute my bakes to this community and to hear everyone's thoughts!