What is Xanthan Gum?

At Bread SRSLY, we’re proud to bake and share delicious and nourishing gluten-free sourdough made from just a few simple, allergy-friendly ingredients. One of our base recipes is a mixture of organic gluten-free grains (white rice flour, millet flour, and sorghum flour), arrowroot, water, salt, and xanthan gum. Our Gum-Free, Rice-Free Sourdough Sandwich Rolls and our Cinnamon Raisin Gluten-Free Sourdough Loaves are made with a rice-free and gum-free base recipe.

What is Xanthan Gum?

 

In traditional baked goods, gluten gives dough its stretchiness (think of tossing and rolling out fresh pizza dough). Since gluten-free baked goods, like Bread SRSLY Sourdough, don’t contain any gluten, they rely on other ingredients to achieve elasticity and hold the dough ingredients together. We call this function “binding.”

That’s where xanthan gum comes in. We use it as our binder to hold all of our loaf and dinner roll ingredients together. Xanthan gum absorbs water, which creates just enough structure for tender little air bubbles to retain their shape and form a delicious, light, cohesive crumb structure.

Xanthan gum is made from fermented sugar (in our case, corn sugar) broken down by a plant bacteria called Xanthomonas campestris. The remaining product is dried, then turned into a powder. That powder is the xanthan gum that we mix into our Classic Gluten-Free Sourdough recipe. 

While there aren’t corn allergens in the final product, some people with corn sensitivities choose to avoid our products made with xanthan gum.

Just a little bit of xanthan gum goes a long way in holding our ingredients together, and creates that dreamy crumb and texture you may have missed from gluten-containing baked bread.

Our Gum-Free, Rice-Free Sourdough Sandwich Rolls, as well as our Cinnamon Raisin Gluten-Free Sourdough Loaf, are delicious xanthan gum-free alternatives made using organic psyllium husks as a binder instead of xanthan gum, so you’ll still experience that same amazing crumb, without the gum.