Bread Recipe Using Vital Wheat Gluten

One of the main reasons we avoid wheat bread on keto is because of the grains – but what people don’t know is that the protein in wheat – aka gluten – is entirely keto friendly and very low carb! If you’re lucky enough to be able to get your hands on some, you can make this keto bread with vital wheat gluten!

**NOTE: This bread contains gluten and therefore anyone with celiac or gluten intolerance should NOT make this bread. (In fact, I’d avoid it if you even live in the same house/apartment as someone who lives with celiac/intolerance)

So I haven’t tried making this vital wheat gluten bread in a bread machine but it’s worth a try. If anyone gives it a go – let me know how it turns out!

Is Faux Flour Possible With Vital Wheat Gluten?

The two main ingredients in this bread – vital wheat gluten flour and almond flour. You will want to make sure that you get vital wheat gluten flour and NOT gluten flour. Most gluten flours are just high protein wheat flours that are high in carbs.

As for the loaf pan – I used a 9×5 loaf tin, but I also halved the recipe and tried in a 1 loaf pan (see pics below). I recommend using an 8.5 x 4.5 for optimal rise. The 9×5 was great but a little wide. The 1lb tin worked perfectly for half the recipe so a proper 8.5 x 4.5 pan will work just as well.

I used a stand mixer – as seen in the video attached to this page. It’s really important to check the consistency of the bread frequently. It should only take around 5-10 minutes for it to be kneaded properly (even if it doesn’t look like it) so you’ll want to pull a piece of the dough and if it stretches without breaking (and you can feel resistance from the gluten) then you’re good to go.

Keto Bread 39% Vwg Test 6 Recipe By Ketoluna

After it’s done in the mixer – it won’t really look like a bread dough – so to bring it all together, I oil the counter and my hands so I can knead until it’s a nice dough that is stretchy and there’s no holes in the outer layer. That’s when it’s good to place into the bread tin to rise.

Leave it covered and rising for about 2 hours and it should double in size. However, it may rise differently depending on altitude, humidity and yeast. (For eg, . traditional yeast is probably better than instant yeast)

And that’s all there is too it! If you want to give a gluten free keto friendly bread a try – take a gander at my keto white bread!

What Is Vital Wheat Gluten And How To Use It

If you're having issues kneading by hand and it keeps tearing - let the dough sit for 5 minutes and add a tsp of water.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read MoreWhile it's not a perfect fix in all cases, vital wheat gluten can help all-purpose flour perform more like bread flour by boosting its protein levels.

Sho Spaeth has worked in publishing and media for 16 years. Prior to joining Serious Eats, he worked at The New York Times for a decade. Sho has written for Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Baffler Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, among other publications.

Whole Wheat Bread Experiment

From the dawn of civilization to in these uncertain times, bread has been a staple of the human diet, and cultures the world over have discovered the culinary magic of applying heat to a dough made from ground wheat and water. But one lesson that all of us had reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic is there's bread, and then there's

Bread. Whether you could no longer patronize your favorite bakery, or whether you, like millions of others, boarded the sourdough bread train, it was painfully obvious to bread lovers everywhere that not all breads are equal.

To complicate matters for home bakers, supply chain issues made bread flour, which many recipes call for, harder to come by. In many cases, dosing regular all-purpose flour with vital wheat gluten is a viable workaround. Now that the worst of the pandemic is behind us and grocery shelves are more or less fully stocked, workarounds like this feel less urgent. Nonetheless, if you are unable to buy bread flour—or simply wish to make do with the flour you already have stocked in your pantry—adding vital wheat gluten is an option worth considering.

Master Recipe From

Vital wheat gluten comes in more than one form. Many people probably know it better as seitan, the mock-meat that is widely used in many East Asian cuisines and has been adopted by many vegetarians and vegans in the West as a versatile source of protein. But in the context of baking bread, vital wheat gluten is a dry, flour-like powder. It is considered a dough conditioner, an ingredient that can be added to bread recipes to encourage specific characteristics in the dough.

Vital wheat gluten is essentially wheat flour that's been stripped of almost all of its starch, leaving behind a substance that is almost entirely made up of wheat proteins. Wheat proteins, when combined with water, form gluten, which, as Harold McGee notes in

, is a complex, semisolid structure...which is both plastic and elastic: That is, it can stretch under pressure and yet tends to resist that pressure. These properties are the reason why yeast-raised breads made from wheat flour can expand to contain carbon dioxide produced by yeast without breaking.

Vital Wheat Gluten And Diastatic Malt

Vital wheat gluten is produced by mixing wheat flour with water to form a dough, after which the dough is repeatedly washed in water to dissolve and strip away the starches in the dough.* According to Bakerpedia, the resulting mass of close-to-pure gluten is then wet-milled—extruded into pellets—and dried at controlled temperatures, since excessively high temperatures can damage gluten's functionality, a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who has made a hot-water dough, like the one in scallion pancakes. The process yields a powder that is about 73% wheat protein.

*If you've ever made seitan at home, in which you massage a wheat flour dough in a large bowl of water to produce a rubbery mass that looks like a skeleton of a loaf of bread, you may be familiar with this process. Relatedly, as Fuchsia Dunlop notes in The Land of Fish and Rice, the starchy water that is a byproduct of the process can be used to produce liang pi, or cold-skin noodles.

Gluten is what provides structure to bread. When sufficiently hydrated, gluten becomes a cohesive network that's viscoelastic, meaning it becomes both extensible (it can be stretched and formed) and also elastic (it will at least partially return to its initial form when deformed by external pressure, as when it's stretched).

How To Make Homemade Bread Flour

These two, contradictory properties are the reason why gluten is so important for yeast-raised breads. As yeast organisms produce carbon dioxide in the dough, gluten's extensible nature means it can inflate to accommodate the production of the gas, whereas its elastic nature means it's strong enough to trap and retain that gas without breaking, resulting in a risen loaf that's light and chewy, not hard and dense.

Since gluten is produced by hydrating wheat proteins, specifically the proteins glutenin and gliadin, the amount of protein in a given wheat flour will determine how strong the gluten network becomes when made into a dough. Different wheat flours contain different amounts of protein: Cake flour, for example, has a relatively low amount of protein (typically about 8%), which leads to tender and soft pastries and cakes. Bread flour, on the other hand, has a higher protein percentage (up around 13%), allowing it to make extra chewy and elastic loaves.

This is where vital wheat gluten comes in. Say, for example, that you can only find all-purpose flour, which has more protein than cake flour but less than bread flour. It can be used to bake good breads, though they won't have quite the same structure and texture as bread made from higher-protein bread flour. Add vital wheat gluten, which is primarily made up of wheat proteins, and you can bump your all-purpose flour's protein percentage.

Easy Whole Wheat Bread

Of course, while adding vital wheat gluten to something like all-purpose flour pushes its protein percentage up into bread-flour territory, that doesn't magically turn AP flour into bread flour in all respects, since their differences are not protein percentage alone. As a practical matter, then, the question is, how well adding vital wheat gluten works as a stopgap when you can't get the flour you want? Can you otherwise follow a recipe as written and get good results?

Yes, according to Francisco Migoya, the head chef at Modernist Cuisine and the co-author of Modernist Bread. Short answer is, you can do that, Migoya said. If you have a low-protein flour or something not quite as strong as bread flour, you can compensate for that lack of strength by adding vital wheat gluten. When I asked specifically about all-purpose flour, Migoya said, Typically, all-purpose