Gluten free bread is a bit tricky because gluten is really the key ingredient to making yeast bread so bread-y. It is what makes it stretchy and elastic rather than like a batter when you mix it together. I can make a mean wheat loaf, and I can make gluten-free cornbread, waffles and muffins without even knowing the difference... but when you make gluten-free sandwich bread, it is basically impossible to truly replicate real bread.
Thankfully I skipped lots of horrible loaves of nasty bread by googling "best gluten-free bread." The first entry on the google results is for a gluten-free millet-oatmeal bread that I have now tried twice, with good results both times. I picked it because it had the least esoteric combination of flours, or at least an esoteric combination of flours that I could handle (rice, oat and millet I already had on hand).
(http://glutenfreemommy.com/baking-gluten-free-bread-millet-oatmeal-bread/).
The process is definitely more time-intensive than making regular bread. I mean, what regular recipe calls for 16 ingredients? It only takes four ingredients to make a great loaf of yeast bread. I think a big reason for this is that it's pretty important to mix up a bunch of different flours to try to mimic wheat flour as closely as possible. Another complication: who has loads of millet flour or brown rice flour on hand? I'm sure you could find them at Whole Foods, but I have little interest in paying big money for boutique flours. Thankfully, Austin gave me a flour mill a couple years ago for my birthday and so I can just begin the bread making process by grinding millet and brown rice into flour. It is not hard, but does make the undertaking a little bit longer, messier and noisier.
Today I tripled the recipe and came out with 80+ slices of good sandwich bread. Not quite as fun as making real bread, but it was satisfying. If you do check out that recipe, I didn't quite do it as written. I cut the salt by a third, and I thought the bread was still too salty. I upped the xantham gum by 50% (this is the key gluten replacement) after my first attempt, and it definitely helped the texture of my second batch. And I have no idea what sweet rice flour is so I substituted buckwheat flour instead.
I also bought a couple loaves of gluten free bread at Trader Joe's a couple weeks ago for comparison purposes to see what is possible in a commercial kitchen(at $4 each they were a deal compared to $5+ for a loaf at Whole Foods). The loaves I tried were fine, but definitely not great. They suffered from the same problems as the bread I made: really dense. When you pick them up it is shocking how heavy they are, but thankfully the taste is pleasant and the texture isn't bad once you get over the fact that it is so dense.
