A gluten experiment

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: Baking experiments! Ok, maybe you didn't know, since I haven't posted so much about it, but at least today I did one, testing how gluten behaves in various solutions. Would it poof up in the oven? Would it form durable bubbles? How wet would it get? What would the final consistency be? I decided to keep the tests as simple as possible, using just a liquid and gluten, not even adding salt.

I did four tests in little teflon pans:

#1: I took 50ml cold water and poured 25g gluten into it, stirring as best I could, then let it stand for half an hour.
#2: Seeing how #1 clumped up, I now took 100ml cold water and slowly poured 25g gluten into it while stirring, then let it stand for half an hour.
#3: With the oven preheated, I again took 100 ml cold water and slowly poured 25g gluten into it while stirring.
#4: Lastly, I beat one egg and slowly poured 10g gluten into it while stirring, then beat it some more.

I pour four into the oven, preheated to 200C:

As you can see, #1 (on the left) is very lumpy, looks like porridge, but is a lot stickier. #2 and #3 are similar, though I think I poured #3 more carefully, having pre-measured the gluten, so it's a bit more even. #4 (on the right) is slightly foamy.

I let them stay in the oven until they started browning. After 10 minutes, #4, having the egg advantage, had poofed up quite a bit, while the water-based ones were only changed a little bit:

At T+13 minutes, things are clearly starting to happen.  #1 is getting weirdly blobby, and #4 is splitting.

At this point, perhaps due to being exposed to sudden heat, my phone camera stopped working, so I switched to my DSLR. After 20 minutes, #1 has formed a glistening ball, and #2 and #3 are poofing up as well. I took out #4 at this point, it being nicely golden-brown. The heat change from doing this caused #1 to collapse somewhat, but it recovered.

At 23 minutes, #1 was getting quite brown on the inside (our own heats a bit more from the back), and there's yet more movement in #2 and #3. I took out #1, this time noticing #2 and #3 deflating slightly, then pumping themselves up again when the door was closed - #3 looked like it was breathing for a bit!

It took until 32 minutes before #2 was ready to come out.

#3, the laggard, took a full 37 minutes before it was brown enough to escape the heat, and it wasn't even that brown:

Of course, as soon as they came out of the oven, they started collapsing. #1 deflated drastically at once, #2 and #3 not so much, and #4 somewhere in between. This show is after they had time to cool down.

Now to the important part: What was the structure like? I used a wooden butterknife to get each of them out (I hadn't greased the pans at all), then as carefully as possible cut each of them through with a breadknife.

The results:

#1 was rather soggy. While it grew immensely, it also deflated the most, ending up being a shrunken flop, smaller than the rest of them. It was quite rubbery when chewed, while also being wet. Very unpleasant.

#2 had a rather nice texture, better than #3, probably from standing around for a while and letting the gluten act. It was slightly wet and somewhat rubbery, but not a bad basis for further experiments. See how the crumb looks like an English muffin? Not bad for standing around for half an hour.

#3 was like #2, but slightly less pleasant, wetter and not as well formed. Letting the gluten work does make a difference, though less than I expected.

#4, with the eggs, were a surprise: It was totally hollow! I'm amazed that it kept as much of its shape as it did. This has potential for being filled with something right after coming out of the oven, or maybe even in the oven, or could take other ingredients and still be interesting. The texture was chewy but not rubbery like the other ones, not as wet, with a very eggy taste.