Keto Low Carb Bread Which Tastes and Slices Like Normal Bread; Great for Healthy Sandwiches, Toast and Tasty Toasties

The photo above shows the completed loaf, sliced and a nice healthy sandwich and cheesy toastie made with the bread to show how great the loaf is. Pictures in this guide show the loaf when it came out of the oven.

They taste fantastic, also the bread holds well with the heat of the grill. The bread is springy, hasn't got a "seedy", "eggy" or "gritty" taste, it feels, tastes fantastic and looks like normal bread.

One other great thing, you can freeze the bread, it tastes just as great defrosted as when fresh, also the pieces are easy to separate from frozen too.

Background

My wife has been a diabetic for several years, her close family were insulin diabetics even though led active lives and not overweight. Metformin worked for some time however several months ago her blood glucose levels spiked to a high level; if we didn't do something radical about changing to a low carb diet as well as stopping eating all biscuits, crisps, cakes, sugar in general, rice, bread, pasta; and reducing intake of fruit to a very low and infrequent level. Basically anything with more than a little wheat flour, sugar, durum wheat and cornflower.

Some things are easy to do without however some core foods are more painful to do without than others. Bread is one of them; imagine no toast or sandwiches?

I spent a considerable amount of time researching Keto and low carb variations, not to give my wife a Keto diet but to take the spirit of recipes to replace items we can't eat now. A normal adult female can have in the order of about 200 carbs a day in total; i'm keeping her to about 1/3 of that with any given meal under 40g total. This is one of those recipes I do for her, it is a life-changer; bread is one of those things you really don't want to miss out on.

I tried many different recipes, most tasted eggy, or quite foul; or if tasted ok simply were not up to scratch and didn't look or feel like normal bread.

This is a fantastic recipe, it is based on Diedre's recipe which is a famous one (to give her credit) however I have tweaked the recipe a little to make it a bit different. In all cooking people take a recipe, tweak or adjust it and publish as a new recipe (look how many omelette recipes or bread, etc there are), so this is no different, I can claim it as my recipe as it is slightly different to the original as I have tweaked it. It happened a little by accident as I was low on a couple of ingredients so had to modify the recipe for that bread loaf, result ended up even better than the original recipe, easier to slice, even softer texture too; actually came out if anything, better!

As you see from the photos, this makes bread that looks like normal bread, slices like normal bread, tastes like a very tasty soft bread; makes great sandwiches, toasts well and even stands up to being made into toastie sandwiches (I use a George Foreman grill for this). In fact, i'd say that this bread is even better than the speciality Japanese soft bread loaf I make for myself and also the granary loaves I make for my parents. Yes, I do a lot of baking!

So, onto the recipe and results!

There is a fair bit of science to making any bread and this is no difference.

With normal bread you can make bread with only 4 ingredients; bread flour, water, yeast, sugar. There are different grades of wheat flour depending on how fine it is ground; less ground flour is used in things like biscuits and Yorkshires, very fine "00" flour is good for pasta making. Just above that grade is bread flour, how glutenous the flour is depends on how fine the flour is. When making normal bread, the sugar is eaten by the yeast, which reacts with warm water to excrete as a by-product carbon dioxide, which gets trapped in the gluten in the flour which is why you have fluffy bread instead of a large solid block.

Wheat flour is about 70% carbs, so a slice is usually around 20-25g carbs, one sandwich is more than a diabetic should have for an entire meal!

In contrast, this Keto bread is around 3g net carbs and around 115 calories per slice. It does of course vary with how thick you want the bread, I get 18 slices fine.

Without using wheat bread you don't have the bulk or the gluten which is why making a Keto bread is much harder to get right. This recipe is fantastic - if you have a sandwich with this bread next to a wholemeal sandwich with a commercial loaf or home-made for that matter, you wouldn't know however would prefer the taste and softness of this loaf.

So, some of the ingredients are very familiar and store-cupboard staples - granulated white sugar, instant/active yeast (at least familiar if you bake), salt, eggs, unsalted butter, water.

The less familiar ingredients you need are: oat fibre, ground golden flaxseed (or linseed), vital wheat gluten flour, xanthan gum.

More on that later in this guide.

Notes:

It is important the eggs are at room temperature. If they are out of the fridge, put the eggs in a bowl of warm water for about 20 minutes (not too warm water as you don't want to cook the eggs!). If the eggs are not at room temperature the bread might taste a little eggy, at room temperature they do not.

Butter must be at room temperature, soft but not melted.

Granulated sugar is better than castor sugar as the grains take a bit longer for the yeast to eat. Yes, you can use regular sugar - there are no carbs in the finished loaf as ALL the sugar will be eaten by the yeast and converted to carbon dioxide, so zero carbs means Keto!

If you have a kitchen thermometer, the water needs to be between 105-120 Farenheit - no hotter as it can kill the yeast (129 Farenheit or more as I recall will kill the yeast). If you don't have a thermometer, put your fingers in the water, if the water is warm, like you'd have in a warm bath, then perfectly fine, but no hotter. To be sure, it is a good idea to invest in a kitchen probe thermometer.

Notes

You can knead the dough by hand if you don't have a stand mixer, but a stand mixer takes the work out. My stand mixer uses two tools to knead dough, most stand mixers have one dough hook. The other attachment you need is to mix the ingredients before kneading (as in photo), if you don't have one just use the spatula and a good way to knead that way is to pull the dough and stretch it, do it twice, rotate 90 degrees and do it again; leave for 10 minutes and repeat process, do that until dough is quite stretchy and appears glutenous. If however you really want to do this recipe justice, invest in a stand mixer, mine cost £100 so it isn't too expensive and given how much I now use it, a good investment.

The mix of ingredients are to fill a baking tin, in my case it is 24cm at base long (27cm at top), 10cm high, 9cm wide at base (11cm at top). You can use a non-stick baking tin or a catering tin as i've got which is purely made of tin, tin is good as it doesn't rust and is quite non-stick without a coating. If your baking tin is smaller, either use two smaller tins or adjust the volume of ingredients but 1/3 and see how that fares.

Tools

Stand mixer

Baking tin (see above)

Oil spray (or use a little vegetable or olive oil and spread with a piece of kitchen roll)

A decent set of kitchen scales, you need one that can measure in 1/10ths of grammes for accuracy

Clingfilm (some countries call it Serin Wrap I believe)

Baking or greaseproof paper - otherwise you'll have a job getting the bread out of the pan!

Spatula

Butterknife

Dry ingredients:

15g Instant Yeast

63g White Granulated Sugar

68g Oat Fibre (NOT oat flour!)

113g Ground Golden Flaxseed

270g Vital Wheat Gluten Flour

3.8g Xanthan Gum

9g Salt (table salt is perfectly fine)

Wet ingredients:

3 large or medium sized Eggs, lightly beaten, at room temperature

45g Unsalted Butter at room temperature (plus a little extra to brush bread with)

355g Warm Water (see notes below)

Notes

It is important to measure the ingredients accurately, although +- 0.2 grammes is ok but no more.

Water can be gauged accurately, it isn't common knowledge but 1ml of water = 1g weight, so 355ml water = 355g weight. That means you can get the water accurately not "about right".

If you are not sure if your bread yeast is too old or not, add about 5g yeast with 10g sugar in half a cup of water and cover for about 10 minutes. If the yeast is frothy, you're fine; if there isn't a cloudy and fairly frothy top then the yeast isn't good so use a different one. You need to use instant yeast as you can add that to the dry ingredients, active yeast needs to be activated with water first (as the granules are larger).

Flaxseed is the same as Linseed; you MUST use this powdered in this recipe - if what you get are seeds, not a problem, put the seeds in a liquidiser and blend until it is a fine powder. I do that, it is cheaper and gives the same result! You want golden as that improves the colour of the bread.

Where to buy special ingredients

There are a number of sources you can buy the special ingredients, some health shops, Ebay, Amazon, etc however I found a source in the UK that offer very good prices, fast and free delivery too. If you are interested to know or have any questions on this guide, where please send me a message or leave a comment so I can reply.

Method

Add all the dry ingredients to the stand mixer bowl and mix thoroughly. As the yeast is dry it cannot react to the sugar at this stage so no worries. Add the wet ingredients, mix with spatula initially until reasonably mixed, then transfer bowl to the stand mixer and use your beater attachment for a few minutes at medium/high speed until mixture is fairly doughy and together. If you don't have a beater attachment you can use the spatula instead, and your arm muscles!

Change the beater attachment to kneading attachments on your stand mixer, knead for about 10 minutes on medium speed. What you want is the dough to not stick to the sides of the bowl and also kneading nicely; that way the moisture is right. If the dough is sticking to the sides a bit (as will do as the kneading progresses) just add a teaspoon of oat fibre and half a teaspoon of the flaxseed (approximately) and repeat until consistency is right, as shown in the photos.

While the dough is kneading, prepare your baking tin. Put the tin onto baking paper and cut it to the size of the bottom of the baking tin. To make it easy, wet the baking tin inside so the baking paper will attach to it nicely.

Wet your hands and give them a shake so your hands are both wet but not dripping, then take the dough from the bowl and fold it over on itself a few times so it is forms a ball, then mould it into a rectangle in your hands so it fits nicely in the baking tin evenly. Use spray oil (or wipe some vegetable or olive oil with a piece of kitchen roll) to oil a piece of clingfilm and drape it loosely over the tin. Move the tin to the sunshine, or a warm room; for example by a window on a sunny day, airing cupboard, in front (not on as the viabration would shake out the dough bubbles!) of a tumble dryer if using it. Every now and again check clingfilm is loose so it isn't pulling on the dough.

Leave the dough for about 1 hour 10 minutes to rise; don't leave it too much longer than that as otherwise the bread is more likely to collapse when baked. About 30 minutes into the rise pre-heat the oven to 180 Farenheit, your oven will need that time to be totally hot (oven cavity at that temperature not just the air heat).

When nicely risen about 2cm or thereabouts over the top of the loaf tin, nicely rounded; remove clingfilm and put loaf in the middle of the oven; bake for 27 minutes, then turn off heat to oven and half open the oven door leaving the loaf where it is. This step reduces the chance of the bread collapsing much when cooling. 10 minutes later, remove the loaf from the oven and let it cool for about 15 minutes more, then turn out the loaf onto a baking tray to cool, taking the opportunity to remove the baking paper (or the loaf will be too moist).

Leave the loaf for a couple of hours or more to completely cool to room temperature before slicing. If you try and slice the bread when it is still a bit warm the loaf will collapse as the steam will escape from the loaf, so it is important to wait.

One tip on slicing the bread with a sharp bread knife - as the bread is springy you will get an even cut if you press the bread down a little before slicing it.

One other great thing, you can freeze the bread, it tastes just as great defrosted as when fresh. For best results, whatever you aren't going to eat that day, cut into slices and put in a freezer bag. It freezes so each piece detaches easily too.

As you see, the bread is nicely risen, it rose about 3x its original size. Sure, the middle might go down a little after baking as in the photo but is only a little and to be expected. The loaf comes out a large and soft and bouncy loaf.

As you also see in the photos, the bread slices nicely, you can expect to get around 16-18 slices from the loaf; it is lovely as bread, toast and is also fine to make a grilled toastie sandwich (I use an old George Foreman grill for this purpose) as it is robust enough bread to do so.

This is seriously the best Keto low carb bread around. Each slice is approx 3g carbs and 115 calories so it means a diabetic can enjoy bread again. The exact amount varies to the amount of slices you get (18 slices is a good guide) plus of course the brand of ingredients you use, however it is a pretty accurate guide.

In the photo there is a grated cheese, lettuce and tomato sandwich and behind it a grated cheese grilled toastie; half has Marmite in it too.

They taste fantastic, also the bread holds well with the heat of the grill.

One other great thing, you can freeze the bread, it tastes just as great defrosted as when fresh. For best results, whatever you aren't going to eat that day, cut into slices and put in a freezer bag. It freezes so each piece detaches easily too.