In mid November I baked my first loaf of bread using a gas oven vs the electric I had used for my entire Gluten Free experience. For the first time since starting out with gluten free baking my loaf was not nice and round on the top when it cooled. It was beautiful in the oven and beautiful while it was warm, but when fully cooled it did not exactly 'sink', but it just got smaller, maybe less round? Not sure how to describe it. It bothered me some and I made slight changes in it each time a made it. It was not until I took the loaf to a friend, who's daughter was living off that store bought cardboard stuff (sorry friend :o), that I was bothered enough to work vigorously on fixing the problem. It was quite embarrassing to me that I was handing a less than perfect loaf to someone and it was representing me. I dumbly explained that I did not know what happened, but our gas stove does not work well with my recipes. Doesn't that sound dumb?! Isn't an OVEN an oven? After that, I started popping out loaves of bread like it was popcorn, I baked about 10 loaves over the next 2 weeks!! So now I share.
I had a few leads:
Everywhere I read in my need to troubleshoot it seemed it was a liquids issue. And I thought, but we only changed ovens, why liquids, why anything to do with the bread. Then I was clearing eggs off the table one day and realized that they had the same shrinking effect as my bread did as they cooled and I was using 4 eggs. So I went to make the bread using no eggs, but I could not bring myself to omit the eggs and only dropped it down to two eggs. It did get better. I was really perplexed now, we only changed stoves, I always had this recipe and it always worked. I knew that eggs helped with rise and prevented crumbling; I WAS SCARED TO REMOVE EGGS, SO I LEFT THEM THERE.
Maybe I SHOULD remove liquids. But in devising the recipe I found that liquids REALLY helped with the rise. I also did not want to remove liquids, it was really scary. Honestly, the whole process was scary for me! Why couldn't I just move back to our other house and use our other oven (OK, that IS a little eXtrEmE, isn't it?!) So I moved forward removed the yolks, because they DON'T help with much of anything, cut some liquids, and yes it DID GET BETTER.
BUT THEN I DISCOVERED THE REAL PROBLEM.
We had an HVAC technician out to fix an air flow issue with our heater. In the discussion he said that electric burns hotter than gas. Made me think about my problem, though I could not ask him anything else. I started searching about ovens. I learned that not all ovens are true to their temperatures and electric ovens are more evenly heated than gas. Then this morning I discovered that an electric oven uses dry heat and GAS OVENS USE MOIST HEAT. Moisture to cook!! Water!! Unbelievable!! The gas oven was messing with my recipe and adding its own moisture to my previously perfect bread!!! (explained here thanks to Wise Geek)
PROBLEM SOLVED!!!
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