A Wheat Lover with Celiac

Gluten Free Flour Guide

2012-01-16T17:06:00.000-08:00

This type of information is available all over the internet. However I've never read one that I responded to with, "Yup, that's all you need to know." Part of the difficulty is that there are a lot of personal idiosyncrasies that make one universal guide not possible. So, this is really just Allison's Personal Guide.

Just so you know, this is absurdly extensive. I've done a lot of study and a lot of baking and I don't know anyone else who wants to know this much - but everyone wants to know a piece of it. Hopefully the headings will help you find the piece you want.

Where to start? Well, let's start with the number one rule of gluten free baking:

You will never use a single flour in your recipe ever again.

When you go to the store and check out the ingredient list of that new gluten free item they've stocked and it only lists one flour, put it back. That won't taste good. The exceptions are few, although there are some. Vietnamese and Thai noodles (and usually Japanese Udon) are just rice. I think it's possible for some tempura to be only rice flour (although American restaurants usually use some wheat). Generally, ask yourself, "Is this a traditional, un-altered recipe? Have people been eating is this way hundreds of years? Then maybe it's ok. Other exceptions - you can use a single starch to thicken a sauce the way you might of with a tablespoon of wheat flour. And elsewhere in these pages we made some darned good fried chicken using only quinoa flour.

What is gluten and why is it a big deal?

Baking is chemistry and understanding the chemistry behind it can make it easier to improvise. Gluten is a protein composite (made up of a couple just slightly smaller proteins - glutenin and gliadin, the latter being the one a celiac reacts to). Proteins are complex molecules with structures that allow them to fold into really tight balls but when they're denatured by any one of a number of processes (like getting wet in a dough, stirring, heating, being exposed to something acidic like vinegar) some portion of those proteins unfold and that makes them capable of making new links with starches, which are shaped like chains. Think of the proteins as a jumble of many, many handcuffs that when they're denatured they get detangled and unlock and can then lock on to one or the other end of the starches. You could see how lots of these together would make a super structure of links and that's what makes your baked goods hold together. There are lots of different kinds of proteins but wheat flour is special because the two different proteins together are especially good at creating viscosity which traps air, but they don't coagulate (set up with the starches) until baked. In the first step, the dough is like a balloon - it's stretchy and malleable. Baking turns it into a zeppelin which holds it's shape even when the air escapes.

What are we trying to accomplish when we put together gluten free flours?

We can't replace the unique properties of glutenin, gliadin, and wheat starch, but we can try to hit upon it's particular ratios in an attempt to reproduce it, albeit incompletely. 100 grams of all purpose wheat flour is roughly 76g carbs (which you can think of as starches, although there's a little sugar in there), 10g protein, 1g fat, and 3g fiber. No, that's not 100% but that's ok because there are other things in there. But we care about the fat, carbs, and fiber, and protein. When you are attempting a mix, those are generally the amounts you're roughly going for. Also, a thing to remember, wheat flour is roughly a dollar a pound. We'll compare to these baselines as we go.

These are in order of how often I use them.

White Rice Flour: The number one most common flour in gluten free baking

I buy this stuff from amazon (here, if you're interested) 6lbs at a time. That doesn't sound like a lot if you're an avid baker, but you won't be use it exclusively. It's about $2/lb on amazon and a little bit more in the store. Stats: 100 grams has 80gr carbs, 6 grams protein, 2 grams fiber, and 1 gram fat. White rice also mills to a kind of gritty texture. It's close in a lot of things, but it's extra starch and its lower fiber and protein levels make it an imperfect replacement. However, many commercial products use it as a one-to-one and it's not terrible.

Tapioca Starch

(Also called Tapioca flour - generally the difference that the starch version has all the non-starch taken out, but Tapioca is already all starch) Tapioca is made from the cassava root and is a big part of Brazilian cooking. They have a cheese bread made exclusively of tapioca starch called pao de quejo which is kind of awesome. Generally, though it's an additive. It's strongest feature is that it's almost entirely flavorless. So you can add it to up your starch without adding the faint potato taste of potato starch or adding the some-what-common allergen in corn starch. Like other starches, it ends up tasting just a bit sweet. In 100 grams of tapioca flour, there is 85 grams of carbs, 0 protein, 0 fiber. (Compare to corn starch that has 91 grams of carbs in 100 grams, but also 1 gram of fiber). Available on Bob's site at approximately $2.60/lb

Defatted Soy Flour

Bob's calls it low-fat soy flour. Warning, warning, warning - this stuff is awesome and high in protein and together with the previous two makes my most successful flour substitute, however! Before it's cooked, it smells terrible. It smells like law clippings. It's fine after baking, but it's not appropriate for any really tender or raw (like cookie dough) uses. Also, enough soy flour (and you'll eat a ton, because it's good) can cause GI distress in lots of people - even people who don't normally have GI distress. I like it just fine and I thought I had the weakest system on the planet, but other people have complained. Next warning, do not mistake with full fat soy flour. I have never found the defatted soy flour at a grocery store, I have only bought it online or directly from Bob's Mill Store in Milwaukee, OR. Soy flour is absurdly nutritious, and the super high fiber is probably to blame for the reactions people have to it. I, personally, can't get enough. 100 grams of defatted soy flour has 52 grams of protein, 4.5 grams of fat, 25 grams carbs, and 15 grams dietary fiber (most of which is soluble fiber). A single bag comes out to $3.25/lb or $2.80/lb in 5.5lb packs.

My fav mix's stats

If you take equal parts of the previous three, this is what you get in 100 grams - 63 grams carbs, 19 grams protein, 2 grams fat, and 6 grams fiber. You can see this is still a lot more "strong" than all purpose wheat flour, but sometimes that's necessary because the proteins don't work quite the same way. I use this mix in cookies and moist, dense cakes. I've used it in the recipes from the book it came from and also used it as a substitute in traditional cookie recipes. My favorite cupcake recipe uses it. However, it's not good for more tender uses - crepes, quick breads, thickening sauces.

Potato Starch

One starch and another are generally interchangeable. Their stats are pretty similar. Most of the flavor of something lives somewhere besides the starch, although the starch can absorb flavor and scents. Potato starch is an incredibly finely milled starch (which means it gets all over your kitchen, as does tapioca) and ends up very smooth when dissolved in liquid. So you can use it for gravy. It's denser than the other starches because of how finely it's milled, meaning by volume you use less. No fat, no protein, you get about 83g carbs in 100g of starch, so you can see how close it is to Tapioca. It's also pretty inexpensive at $2.40/lb for one bag (less in bulk like normal).

Brown Rice Flour

There are plenty of cookbooks that use brown rice flour the way I use white rice flour - as the go-to, in-everything flour. But there's a reason I haven't mentioned this particular problem before - with the exception of the soy flour, everything up to now has both smelled and tasted very neutral. And the soy tastes very neutral. But most gluten free flours have a flavor. So does wheat flour, of course - but most of the recipes you're using wheat flour with are working with its flavor and do it well. Brown rice flour, at it's heart, tastes like a wet brown paper bag. It's sweet, but in that grainy way that is only sweet as it sits in your mouth for too long. That doesn't mean I don't use it, I do - it's got fiber and protein that white rice doesn't and in sweet/hearty uses it can be decent, even good. One of the books I've reviewed on this blog, however, uses a brown rice/sorghum mix for everything. Don't do that. It doesn't work for everything. Stats: 100 g flour has 77g carbs (with 5 g fiber), 7.5 g protein, 2.5 g fat. Clearly much closer to wheat flour than just about anything, which is why people use it - but it's gritty like the white rice and dissolves with the slightest moisture (like in your mouth). It's about $2.20/lb at the store. I never buy a large quantity because I rarely use more than about 2 tablespoons in a recipe.

Cornstarch

Non-gf bakers use cornstarch, so I won't say too much. It's cheap, it's starchy, it's familiar. Corn can be an allergen, though, so I often use something else. Also, it can be lumpy in gravy. One solution is to dissolve your starch in milk or water to make a slurry before you add it to your gravy. There's a line of baked goods they sell in the frozen section called FrenchMeadow. I link to them, so you can see the branding and avoid it. They take the standard wheat flour out and replace it exclusively with cornstarch. It tastes exactly how you think it would. Blech.

Xanthan or guar gum

Gums are polysaccharides that GF bakers use to reproduce some of the "glue" properties of gluten. They're much simpler molecules and they don't have the two state system of natured and denatured (they're more like hooks and less like handcuffs that both open and close) which means that they continue to get "gluier" as time passes when gluten would stop making new connections. This is a big reason why GF products don't have the shelf-life than gluten products do. They get tough which most people attribute to being "stale" (losing moisture to evaporation) but it's frequently that the gums are continuing toughening up the dough. That doesn't mean don't use them. You don't usually need them in the super high protein uses (except bread, which is the highest demand on the "stickiness" of your dough), but when you do use them, try not to make more than you're going to eat in a couple of days. Freezing slows things down, microwaving them can make them moist again but generally I say just bake small amounts and find recipes that let you bake frequently without too much work.

Xanthan versus guar gum

Some people say that celiacs can develop a sensitivity to xanthan gum. Some people say guar gum is "more natural" because it's essentially squeezed out of a bean while xanthan is synthesized in a laboratory. I think the first isn't true and the second isn't relevant. In my experience, they work pretty much the same in baking. What does matter to me is this: xanthan gum is $25/lb, guar gum is $9.60/lb. You don't use very much so it took me a good year to get through my half pound of xanthan that I bought before I knew better, but I'm all guar all the time now. They're essentially one-to-one replacements if you've got a recipe that calls for the other. I think guar is a little gentler, but I've only seen recipes that asked for too much and not too little. Too much xanthan makes your dough taste metallic. I learned that lesson early so I don't know what too much guar gum does :).

Albumen or Egg White Powder

I hadn't ever used this before I bought the Gluten Free Baking with the CIA book and it is a little expensive. Basically they separate egg whites and then dry them so they turn into pure protein powder and like other protein powders (whey, soy, etc) they're marketed as additives to smoothies for body building or whatever. Just make sure when you get it, it's not flavored. I have a canister of this: It's $22 for a pound but I use it pretty sparingly - a tablespoon or two per recipe (Amazon says I bought the last one in August and it's still 75% full). As I said, the key to gluten free baking is replacing lost protein and this is pure protein. Obviously, it's not vegan. But it does amazing things with trapping air bubbles in your baked good without throwing off the liquid/dry ratio that adding an egg white would. I especially like it in crepes.

Millet flour

Millet is generally Asian in origin, and according to wikipedia was the food staple of prehistoric India, China, and Korea. It's inexpensive, yellow, and with decent wheat-like ratios (73 g carbs, 10 g protein, 3 g fat, and 13 of fiber). I've not done a ton of improvising with it, but I've used it as part of a recipe (ye who are reading this and were at my Christmas dinner had some in the rolls) and it's part of the flour mix in my new favorite brand of mixes and pasta, Manini's. I'll do a full post on them later. Available here for about $1.50/lb - the cheapest on the list. It's got kind of a sweet flavor and it turns your batter kind of egg colored.

Quinoa flour

Quinoa is a tiny grain native to the Andes. Every great ancient empire was built on some grain, and the Incas built theirs on quinoa (quinoa and potato, to be more precise). (It's pronounced keen-wa - if a Spanish speaker tries to tell you it's kee-no-wa tell them they don't speak Quechua). Quinoa is high in protein and high in fiber and people like to call it a "supergrain" because it's so danged healthy. In its natural form, the outside of the grain has a substance on it call a saponin (which is from the same latin root as soap) and it's bitter. The idea is to discourage birds from eating it. Most quinoa is rinsed before it gets to you, but usually not that well and they want you to rinse it again. The grains of quinoa, however, are smaller than the shortest grains of rice and you're not likely to have a small enough sieve to keep it from getting washed down the drain. So I like to get Ancient Harvest quinoa. It's pre-rinsed and yummy. I like using it to soak up chunky sauces and braise broth. It's one of the most filling, satisfying vegan foods I eat. I also eat pasta made by the same people almost every day. (The link isn't a great deal - if you're in the Seattle area, PCC has the best prices on Ancient Harvest pasta). The flour is ground after removing the saponins, but not completely and a bit of a flavor/scent is left behind. Used with highly aromatic dishes, it's completely fine and it's got a good toothy texture. I've used it with tapioca for homemade pasta dough. We've also done gluten free buttermilk fried chicken with it as a one-to-one replacement for wheat. Stats: 75 g carbs (with 14 g being fiber), 14 g protein, 7 g fat. On the expensive, side, however, at $5.10/lb or so

Sorghum flour

Sorghum is sweet and is the basis of most gluten free beers. It's often paired with brown rice flour for better or worse and I haven't done much beyond add it to recipes that called for it. I've used it most often in bread with millet or something else. Stats: 74 g carbs, 12 g protein, 3g fat, and 9 g fiber

Teff

Teff is native to Ethopia and I've only used it once - so I don't have a handle on all the ways it could be used well. It's neutral enough for sweet baked goods (I used it for the lady fingers recipe, found here) In the course of writing this, I feel like I should go back and learn more about teff. It's sitting in my pantry after all. Stats are almost the same as quinoa: 73 g carbs (13 fiber), 13 g protein, 3 g fat. Stay tuned for more information.

Things I bought early on and have not ended up using them much

....and may not do at all. My first gluten free cookbook was Easy Gluten Free Baking by Elizabeth Barbone and I still recommend it as a good beginning cookbook if you've never done gluten free before. Her pie crust recipe is simple and it works. However, her bread recipes include a few items that I bought for those recipes, found myself rather disappointed at the results and never used again. These include sweet rice flour (which isn't actually all that sweet), sweet dairy whey (which is), and nonfat powdered milk. She may have been the reason I tried corn flour as well, although I don't recall for sure. In any event, I have yet to master the uses of sweet rice flour although as far as I can tell it's a grittier white rice flour. (Stats 78g Carbs, 6 g protein, 1 g fat, 2 g fiber). The thing to know about Sweet Dairy Whey is that it is not Whey Protein - it's got a bunch of sugar in it that will ruin your ratios (reference the Blob That Ate My Kitchen post). It's sitting in my pantry and I don't know how to use it. Corn flour smells terrible. Gluten free bakers know that some GF flours have a smell - a smell that resembles a gross thing we don't usually say aloud. If you know what I'm talking about, corn is stronger than any of the rest. Not sure how I'm going to use that up - but it'll need again a very aromatic, strong flavored dish to wash out the icky smell.

Bean flours: Flours I refuse to use because I hate them

Garbanzo bean flour is an inexpensive way to get your protein. But I hate it. There's a flavor in the flour that some people are sensitive to and some people are not. If you've ever eaten something made with a Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free mix, and enjoyed it, you're not sensitive to this flavor and may enjoy a trip to Flying Apron Bakery. My husband can taste it, but he's not as sensitive to it as I am. One bite of a cookie with garbanzo bean flour in it and my mouth tastes like green stem and beans for hours. Garbanzo bean is weaker than soy and fava, but still high in protein (20 grams in 100 grams of flour) but please don't serve it to picky people.

Nut flours: or, too expensive for me to mess with

Almond, chestnut, and coconut can all be ground into flour. They all retain the flavor of what they're made from, and that can be absolutely delicious (French macaroons are usually made with almond flour -so...point). Almond is very high in fat, which makes it more likely to throw off liquid/dry ratios if its in too high amounts. Coconut is so high in fiber that when you add liquid to it, it puffs of and turns into a gelatinous thing. Chestnut I've never touched. Apparently you can get peanut flour, too, but I haven't tried that either. Almond flour is $12/lb, coconut flour is $7/lb.

Extra Valuable Information

Non-Bob's Red Mill flours are cheaper, when you can find them, but you need to make sure that you're satisfied by their procedures to prevent cross contamination. Bob's Red Mill does wheat flour as well, as most mills do, but they also have a dedicated chamber under positive pressure (like an operating room) so any particles blow out, not in.

Beat the living hell out of your eggs. When you whip eggs, you denature some of their proteins, leaving them open to make new bonds. Fresh, healthy eggs will have better chances of making those connections, but in every case if you really put your arm into you'll increase the power of your eggs. This is important in non-gluten free baking, too, but the consequences are rarely as severe
Bulk foods are frequently cross contaminated with who knows what - if you're sensitive or cooking for someone who is, stick with packaged stuff.

If you're baking for someone other than yourself, it's always good to ask if there are any other restrictions than gluten. I've never known a celiac who could eat everything but gluten

There's no substitute for giving it a try and seeing what you think. My least favorite gluten free bakery is packed all day long - obviously *someone* likes their food.

Putting myself through gluten free school

2012-01-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

The number one block to my experimentation? Lack of ingredients? Nope! Lack of ideas? Not a chance. Lack of skill? Puh-lease! The number one stumbling block to increasing my rate of gluten-free experimentation is lack of eaters.

It's basically impossible to make four kinds of cupcakes and then eat them when only two people live in your house! And inviting people over for a dinner party makes you go for safe recipes - ones you know you can hit out of the ball park; ones you know the timing on, what it looks like when it's done, etc. How does one find eaters for ones (possibly failed) experiments?

You'd think it'd be easy, and I've had people volunteer in the abstract but it's never actually happened.

I may have stumbled upon a solution. My husband likes to play ridiculously complex strategy games with his boys. They take forever. And his friends aren't fussy. They'll eat whatever I put in front of them and are generally thrilled to be fed. They're not the most insightful critics, but they're omnivorous. So I do the criticism. I eat one or two. If they're good I eat more. Either way, they eat the remainders.

Todays experiment: eclairs! This is the eclair recipe from the culinary institute's gluten free baking book, as I have discussed before. The flours are a combination of white rice flour, brown rice flour, starches, guar gum, and albumen. It was my first experiment with a pastry bag and I learned a lot with that. First and foremost being, roll up the top to get the batter further into the bag to avoid it coming out the top. Second, you need more than one tip. The pastry cream also needed to be piped and because I didn't have a small enough tip, I ended up using a (n artless) ziplock bag. It got the cream where it needed to go, but I fantasize about a day when I can make it all fluted like at the bakery.

Universal acclaim, just so you know. For a baked good with so many steps, it's relatively easy and the pastry is delicious. Considering that I have never seen a pate de choix based baked good in a bakery, these turned out really good. In other words, it's not that hard people, especially if you have all the equipment and other people should be able to do it.

My recommendations: make the pastry cream first, it needs to cool completely - like be a little cold to the touch. It'll take longer than the pastry will. The eggs don't need to be room temperature but it does kind of re-solidify bits of butter. My eclairs are tiny. I was concerned about how dense it'd be and I made small ones. It's unnecessary and in the future, I will go ahead and make larger eclairs. Don't be concerned if your piped dough is a bit bumpy (if you use a small tip, it'll end up requiring more than one pass to get the size dough that you want) - the bumpy actually provides a yummy texture. They do puff up, but only about 30% more. Use that as a guide to how high/thick/big to pipe your dough.

I'm working on a list of what the next experiments will be. Hopefully the next thing will be donuts and/or corn dogs.

Pfeffernusse that past muster with the German student far from home for the holidays

2011-12-26T22:28:00.000-08:00

1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened (one stick)
2 eggs at room temperature
2 teaspoons Vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon extract
1/2 teaspoon anise extract (unless you love licorice and then dial it up to a teaspoon)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (fresh if you can!)
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
2 1/2 ounces low fat soy flour
2 5/8 ounces white rice flour
2 5/8 ounces tapioca starch
confectioner's sugar for dusting

Mix dry ingredients (except confectioner's sugar) in medium bowl and set aside.

Cream butter and brown sugar. Beat in eggs and extracts. Add dry ingredients. Mix until smooth. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 375. Spoon and roll out balls of dough a little smaller than golf balls. Place one inch apart on greased cookie sheet. Bake 10 minutes.

Remove cookies from cookie sheet and place on wire racks, sprinkle with confectioner's sugar while still warm.

My five favorite gluten free flour substitutions - from the Culinary Institute of America's Gluten Free Baking

2011-12-26T22:15:00.000-08:00

I have ragged on this cookbook on my blog before - and it has some clear and obvious problems with the clarity of instructions, resources for obtaining the ingredients, and it's reliance on soy flour which is not well tolerated in large amounts by many people. But the truth is, it's my favorite gluten free cookbook and I even gave it as a gift this Christmas.

The book includes much valuable content, including instructions on how to reproduce some of the techniques professional kitchens have (the "proofing" chamber alone is worth the list price) but I think the most valuable bit it the five separate gluten free flour mixes. I have found them so useful that I have actually written up a little google document to do the weight calculations for each mix so that if you are good at choosing the appropriate mix, you can adapt basically any standard gluten recipe to be gluten free (if, like me, you have a high tolerance for soy - I've not yet tried the idea that you could essentially swap out, ounce for ounce, the soy for almond flour - I will be trying that forthwith. It hasn't happened before now because soy flour is around $1.50/lb and almond flour is $7/lb - if you don't hate garbanzo bean, you can try that, too). I use #1 for crepes, #4 for any cookie EVER (I did pfeffernusse a few weeks ago which I will be posting here in a bit), #2 or #3 for muffins or quick breads.

I'm including the link to the google doc - you'll have to go to File>Download As and then download it in your favorite spreadsheet format so you can enter in your desired amount in ounces. (If you do this and it works/doesn't work, please let me know)

Easy Gluten-Free Rolls

2011-12-26T21:59:00.000-08:00

I've posted this recipe before - this is a slightly altered recipe to make it into rolls or savory muffins, which makes them basically fool-proof and very light and fluffy. I'm recommending this recipe to people who are not full-time gluten free bakers but might want a relatively easy roll they can feed to their gluten free friends (like my dad!) I will warn you, it calls for a collection of flours which is somewhat annoying if you're not already maintaining a gluten free pantry. However, the starches are pretty standard (if you're not currently familiar with Tapioca starch, I think it's better than cornstarch in most recipes cornstarch is called for) and millet and sorghum are some of the less expensive GF flours. But the starches are more alike than different in baking. It's best to do the variety, but if you only do one or two, just increase it accordingly (i.e. replace the tapioca with an equal amount of corn starch)

Makes +/- 20 rolls

1 1/3 cup Millet Flour
2/3 cup Sorghum flour
2/3 cup corn starch
2/3 cup potato starch
2/3 cup tapioca starch
1 1/2 tsp guar gum (cheaper than xanthan)
2 tsp salt
2 tablespoons plus 2 tsps sugar
2 packets yeast (1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons)
1 tablespoon plus 1 tsp olive oil
1 cup water, heated to 110 (you can still stick your finger in it without burning, but it feels "hot")

Lightly spray standard muffin tins - you'll need space for around 20, give or take.

Mix all dry ingredients in an electric mixer (including yeast). Add the oil and the water and mix until just blended. Scrape bowl and beaters and then mix at medium high speed for 3 minutes until completely smooth. The dough will be the consistency of cake batter. This is always a shock to an experience wheat-flour baker. Spoon the dough into muffin tins - fill about halfway. They will expand more than cupcakes would, so keep that in mind as you divide the dough evenly among the tins. If you want to cover them with a cloth, you'll need to suspend the cloth over the tins (I used a salt shaker placed between the tins as a little tent pole) otherwise your dough will grow into the cloth and then come up with the cloth when you pull it back, making a mess and denying you considerable volume of bread-goodness. If you've got a good active yeast and a non drafty kitchen, you may choose not to cover them at all.

Allow them to rise until they double in volume - took me about 20 minutes. While the dough is proofing, preheat oven to 400 degrees. Bake until the tops are just starting to turn brown - approximately 15 minutes when I did it.

They come out light and fluffy.

As my uncle said, "Wait, these are gluten free?"

Seriously, Culinary Institute of America? You do this to me again?

2011-08-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

I have a guess as to why my bread was a disaster.

I've said before I'm a fan of the recipes in this book. Well, I'm a fan of the recipes but not the book. It has yet again led me astray with it's lack of specificity. One of the ingredients in the bread recipe I used yesterday was "Whey Powder". This is what they have to say about whey powder: "Whey is the watery component of milk left over from cheesemaking. It contains protein and other nutrients. A powdered version can add strength and color to gluten free flour blends" And this is how Bob's Red Mill describes "Sweet Dairy Whey" thus: "Whey (Sweet Dairy) is a by-product of cheese making. It may be used to replace part of the sugar in recipes plus it tenderizes baked goods. Use in sweet yeast doughs for a satiny delicate texture. Whey imparts a slightly sweet flavor, and is an excellent source of complete protein." Sounds plausibly similar, yes? The big difference is 16 grams of sugar in a 1/4 cup. So. Yeah. I put close to 20 grams of additional sugar in my bread dough. No wonder it turned into the loaf that ate Seattle.

What I find frustrating is that these recipes when not asking for ingredients that are misleading or ambiguous or inappropriately accounted for, they are not just good, they're *better than anything else I've made.* If it weren't so, I'd toss the thing and go back to the drawing board. So I still recommend this book, but with great big disclaimers and warning signs. I'll continue to share my versions of them because I do believe it requires a translator - someone who has done trial and error first.

Let me help you. Do not use this: Sweet Dairy Whey Do use this: Whey Protein (and don't use Protein supplement Powders like this, this, and this).

Now, I have to pick myself up and get back on that gluten free horse. Horses prefer oats, right?

What not to do.

2011-08-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

It started out relatively normal. It's just gluten free bread dough - kind of the consistency of whipped frosting. I've had stuff start out like this and come out yummy.

I let it rise the normal amount of time and if anything it was behind the level it should have been rising after sitting in the sunlit window for an hour.

But then I put it in the oven. 30 minutes into the baking, I think, "Let's see how it's doing! Why don't we turn on an oven light!

Ahhhh!!!! It's alive! It ended up getting almost half again as tall - I was worried it was going ot burn itself on the top side of the oven. It's insane!

I was almost nervous about cutting into, concerned it'd see that as a threat and issue a preemptive strike. It's the gluten free bread that ate Seattle is what it is.

But then, I took it out of the oven. And it fully deflated. Both loaves. Michael compared it to what yorkshire pudding does.

It collapsed into a gummy bread quasar. We did eat some and the flavor was excellent. It just wasn't...you know...bread.

I honestly don't have a good explanation as to what went wrong. The world may never know.

Further adventures in gluten free frozen foods

2011-08-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

Gluten wasn't my first food allergy. When I was about 19, I found myself with severe GI distress at least twice a month. After putting my finger in a machine that measure electrical resistance between me and various possible allergens and being told by a naturopath that I am not allowed to eat anything, I lost interest in naturopathy and began a food diary. Between 18-24 hours after consuming any cured meat (hot dogs, ham, bacon...) it was like a "flush" button got pushed inside my guts. And so I learned about food allergies.

For this reason, I haven't had a corn dog in years. I love corn dogs. And by the time I was able to find nitrite free corn dogs, I was gluten free.

Applegate Naturals to the rescue!

I was walking through Whole Food for hot dogs when I found... Wheat-Free Corn Dogs! I actually did a little dance in the aisle when I saw them. Obviously, though, the proof is in the eating. They're microwavable, which is nice and convenient. Here's what they look like after 2 minutes.

They're gluten-free typical crumbly, but they're frozen corn dogs and I can eat them. It's awesome. At nearly $7 for a box of 4, it's a sometimes food but it makes me feel all warm and comfy.

Bike camping gluten free?

2011-08-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

I didn't grow up camping. My parents weren't exactly luxury hotel types, but they never believed it was a vacation without a bed and a kitchen. I, however, married a tree-hugging dirt worshiper. I've been learning to camp without being miserable for a couple of years now - we've got nice air mattresses, we've got a lovely tent, a hammock, and a good collection of merino wool apparel that's both warm and cool. But we don't lug around a big Coleman stove and a cast iron pan and we're packing in all our own food in panniers. Gluten could have really made it easier to feed ourselves.

Well, not to fret! We've gotten pretty good at eating gluten free on the road and I'm here to share with you some of my secrets. All of these meals can be made with two sets of Titanium cookware, a JetBoil, and an MSR pocket rocket camp stove.

Meals:

Camp Mac'N'Cheese: WinCo Foods sells the powdered cheese sauce like what you get in a box of Kraft Mac'n'Cheese. That plus the elbow noodles of your choice (mine is always Ancient Harvest Quinoa Pasta) butter and a pint of milk you can buy on the road, plus various vegetables and you can have a very lovely meal you can cook in a JetBoil. For a little extra protein, we added hot dog. The peas and broccoli are both from my father-in-law's garden.

Boxed Risotto: Lundberg (of rice fame) does a series of instant box risottos. We made the Tuscan Risotto. Our homemade from scratch risotto is of course way better, but this was more than serviceable and very filling. Whole Foods stocks at least half a dozen flavors.

Beans and Rice: I love Bush's Vegetarian Baked Beans. When I was small, I was Van da Camp's Pork'n'Beans all the time, but for awhile in my early twenties, pork started to upset my stomach and I made the switch. I add Applegate Farms nitrite-free, uncured hot dog slices and heat. Beans have so much fiber (beyond the sugar in the sauce as well as their protein) you feel full no matter how many miles you pedaled that day. We also cooked up just some brown rice to go with. Slices of cheddar on top.

Things you can eat at a gas station:

Cheetoes are gluten-free, ice cream is always a good bet as long as there aren't various things in it you're unsure of. Ben and Jerry's follows good practices with their different flavors to minimize contaminating the Cherry Garcia with the Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Chocolate Milk is great tour calories. Popcorn is also good gas station food.

Lunches:

My lunches entailed a loaf of GF bread (in this case New Cascadia Traditional's Honey Gold, purchased the day before we set out), a container of peanut butter and a jar of jam. As long as your tour isn't more than 4 days, you can't get too sick of it :).

Breakfast: Oatmeal (Bob's Red Mill's GF Rolled Oats) with raisins and pecans.

Many people who have their gluten completely remove go on to live full and productive lives. You can, too.

Oven-Baked Peach Pancake

2011-07-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Based on a traditional german apple pancake, this pancake comes out sloppy, flavorful and delicious. It's that time of year when I buy way too many peaches and find myself in a race between overeating and wilted peaches on the counter. This is a yummy way to get rid of two whole peaches.

If you find measuring the very precise amounts of flour annoying (and I don't blame you) I'll tell you how I do it: I get out my digital scale and put a measuring cup on it larger than the total flour volume. I then zero it out. I add the first flour amount, scooping a teaspoon or so at a time like you would add sugar to tea - checking the weight along the way. When I get to the proper weight, I zero it out again and repeat until my whole flour mix is finished. (The weight measures are more accurate than the volume when adapting from a non-gf recipe

If you want to do the pre-mixed flour thing, go for it - I'll include the 1.5 lbs flour mix recipe at the bottom, but I find that very unrealistic when I have at least 4 cookbooks I like with more than 10 mixes between them. So - I do it this way - and I do it by weight these days.

2 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons White Rice Flour (1 oz)
3 tablespoon Potato Starch (3/4 oz)
2 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoon Tapioca Starch (3/4 oz)
(flour should total 2.5 oz or just over half a cup)
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup half and half
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 tablespoons butter (unsalted preferred, salted is fine)
2 ripe peaches.
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Boil enough water to cover two peaches. Places the peaches in a medium sized bowl and cover with boiling water. Set aside.

Preheat oven at 500 degrees

Whisk together flours, sugar, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, half-and-half, and vanilla until smooth. Adding a little bit of the dry mixture at a time, keep whisking until all is well combined and set aside.

Drain the peaches (carefully!) and refill bowl (with peaches still in it) with cool water. When peaches are cool enough to be handled, you should be able to pull their skin off every easily. Slice the peeled peaches into pieces roughly 1/2 inch thick.

Melt the butter in a 10-inch oven proof skillet (cast iron is best) over medium high heat. Add the peaches, brown sugar and cinnamon. Peaches will cook fast - about 4 minutes - cook until their saucey bits are bubbling and the peaches are a uniform soft texture and bright peach color through out.

Beginning on the outside of the pan, pour the batter over the peaches in a spiral pattern coming inwards.

Place the skillet in the oven and immediately lower the temp to 425. Bake for 18 minutes or until the batter seems dry and has the texture of foam plastic if you push at it. Loosen the pancake edges with a spatula, slice into wedges and eat! The middle might still be soggy, but it's soggy with peach goodness so enjoy.

***Flour Mix #1 from Gluten-Free Baking with The Culinary Institute of America
White Rice Flour - 1 3/4 cup (9.5 oz)
Potato Starch - 2 cups (7.25 oz)
Tapioca Starch 1 1/2 cups (7.25 oz)
Yeilds 5 1/4 cup or 1.5 lbs.

"This is the best gluten free pizza crust I've ever had" - My Mom

2011-07-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'll be buying this book. This book is not for noobs - the instructions are terrible and keep requiring a certain amount of improvisation on my part, but the results are pretty good. Tonight I made pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella and tomato.

This cookbook basically requires a kitchen scale unless you're going to abandon every other cookbook and special flour blend recipes and etc - the portion and halvings/triplings are a lot easier with a kitchen scale. I'm going to give flour amounts in weights. Just a heads up - these flours are not equally dense so the volumes will be different, even though the weights are equal.

I used full fat soy flour, but I suspect the results with low fat soy flour would be better.

6.5 oz Soy Flour
6.5 oz Tapioca Flour
6.5 oz White Rice Flour
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum
1/4 cup vegetable oil.

Make a sponge: Whisk the flours together. Add a cup of the flour mixture to one cup warm (not hot - 110 degrees or so) and the yeast in a medium sized bowl, and stir until smooth and cover with plastic wrap and let it rise for 45 minutes.

Mix the remaining flour with salt and xanthan gum.

Combine both flour mixtures, the oil, and the remaining 1/2 cup water in your stand mixer. Use the paddle attachment to mix for about 2 minutes. The resulting texture should be like cookie dough. Separate the dough into roughly three equal pieces. With oiled hands, take one piece and flatten the dough into the bottom of a cast iron pan to about 1/4 inch thickness as flat and smooth as you can. Repeat with the other two pieces. If you don't have three cast iron pans, try a cookie sheet. It's harder to make it perfectly round, but it works.

Cover with a clean, warm, wet dish towel and let rise for about 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 375 while it's rising.

Parbake the crust for 15 minutes. (At this point you probably could freeze the crust for later use although I haven't tried this yet). Allow the crusts to cool and flip them over. Cover with your topping and complete the baking in the oven for 8 - 10 minutes.

"If I had more room, I'd eat more pizza" - Mom

Always something more to learn

2011-07-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've been *almost* buying the same book for several months now. Gluten-Free Baking with The Culinary Institute of America: 150 Flavorful Recipes from the World's Premier Culinary College I have this complaint of many gluten free cookbooks: they're pansy ass. If you don't know how to make brownies, that's fine, you need a cookbook that can teach you to make brownies. But I'm no gf-noob. I'm not a *baking* noob and I don't want to be restricted to the "easy" foods when I can't actually purchase the not easy foods without taking a second mortgage out on my house (that's, of course, a figure of speech, since we rent our house).
I wanted something that would teach me to make *complicated* baked goods and so I got this title from the library**. This book certainly has that. Perhaps a bit too much.

Another of my criticisms of gf cookbooks is that they have a one-size-fits approached to flour substitution. My mother hates the ones that do the opposite - a specialized mix for each recipe. This cookbook splits the difference and has flour blends, but has 5 of them specialized for different kinds of baking (kind of like back before everything called for all-purpose wheat flour). I like that, but it calls for a flour I hadn't used before and this is actually the real point of this post:

These cookies are stuck together and spongy.

Soy flour is not necessarily soy flour. There is soy flour and there is defatted soy flour. Bob's Red Mill labels them thus: Bob's Red Mill Flour Soy and Bobs Red Mill, Flour Soy Low Fat The difference is about 4.5 grams of fat per 3 tablespoons flour. This cookbook called for defatted soy flour, I provided normal soy flour. It was...shall we say...a disaster. An unusually delicious disaster, but I didn't have chocolate pecan cookies so much as I had puddles that were cookie flavored. Luckily I was in the presence of my Teutonically pragmatic mother who suggested we cook the remaining batter in a baking pan and ended up with absolutely delicious (and absurdly high in protein) chocolate pecan cookie bars.


Delicious Cookie Bars/Coffee Cake/Unknown Yummy Thing

So, yeah - add what's actually called for, not what you think is what's called for. But now I have a bunch of soy flour that needs to get used so I'm attempting to use it anyway. Pizza tonight (blogged about later).

Second... raw soy flour in batter smells. It smells seriously bad. Actually, it smells like ground up pea pods which I could probably consider a pleasant smell were I not expecting the vanilla and butter and chocolate smell of chocolate cookie dough. But the product out of the oven doesn't just smell milder, there is no trace of the pea pod scent. Not in the aftertaste, not the back of the throat - it's actually kind of shocking and hard to accept but the cookies (although the wrong texture) tasted pretty awesome.

**This, btw, is an excellent way to take a cookbook for a test drive. Baking is chemistry, rather than simply imagination - it's hard to guess whether or not a particular cake recipe will turn out delicious or fail to cook through, or taste like peas. If it's non-GF cooking, I just go with whatever www.americastestkitchen.com has to say about it, but gf cookbooks are *not* created equal and many flat out suck. Get it from the library, try a recipe or two and if you aren't loathed to return it after 3 weeks, no harm no foul - but if you find yourself reluctant to give it up, it's worth your money.

My best bread recipe so far

2011-07-09T23:20:00.000-07:00

Bread is a thing, yeah? Good gluten-free bread is not impossible (please try New Cascadia Traditional the next time you're in Portland) but I've had more complete failures than I've had partial successes.

But I have found (and adapted a bit) a decent recipe. It's based on "Crusty Boule" from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients- there is a single chapter of gluten free recipes and this one has been reprinted on the internet a great deal.

But after hearing a bit here and there about sensitivities to xantham gum and how bread's high need for gum and xantham's tendency to continue the gumming process makes it suboptimal, I started throwing around the idea of using a chia/flax slurry instead.

Let's take a moment to talk about chia and flax. The first question I always hear, "You mean like chia pets?" Yes - that's the same plant. The seeds you put on your terracotta pig are an excellent source of fiber, omega-3s, protein, and essential minerals. Flax you've heard of, I'm sure. Chia and flax are just really good for you. But! More important for our purposes, and I'm not entirely sure how/why but grinding up chia and flax seeds and putting them in boiling water sets up a kind thick oatmeal-like gel that vegan bakers use as a decent egg substitute. In bread, it makes a good gum substitute.

I use Bob's Red Mill Organic Flaxseed Meal but I've only ever seen chia sold in bulk. Some people may be too sensitive to risk this, but it's usually in the bulk spice section rather than the other bulk stuff - i.e. far from possible floating flour particles. Chia is dark colored and a little bit smaller than sesame seeds. You can buy a little at a time - I use just about 50 grams of each for a loaf of bread, so I usually only get about a quarter cup at a time.

I then grind the seeds in a coffee grinder. We have a grinder reserved for spices - if you don't have a second grinder, you're going to want to throw some dry white rice into your grinder after you're done with the chia to clean it. It would *not* taste good with your morning coffee.

Achtung! Gluten free bread dough *never* looks like gluten bread dough, but without the gums this bread dough looks nothing like bread dough. It's much closer to brownie batter - it hangs together but will still pour out a baguette pan. I bake it in a loaf pan.

Allison's Version of a Crusty Bread

Slurry:
50 grams chia seed, ground
50 grams flaxseed, ground
1 cup boiling water plus 1/3 cup warm water

Dry Ingredients
1 cup brown rice flour
3/4 cup sorghum flour
1 1/2 cup tapioca starch
1 1/2 kosher salt
1 tablespoon yeast

Wet ingredients
2 eggs at room temperature
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons canola oil
1 tablespoon honey

Begin by preparing the slurry. Bring 1 1/3 cup water to a boil. In a 2 cup (or larger) measure cup (like a pyrex) stir the ground seeds with 1 cup of the water until well mixed. Set the rest of the water aside to cool a little. Let the slurry set for 10-20 minutes.

Mix up the dry ingredients in a stand mixer. Add the eggs, oil, honey, the remaining water and slurry. Mix thoroughly. Cover the mixing bowl with a clean dish towel and set in a warm place (more than 70 degrees - a sunny window, a warm kitchen, something...if you're like my husband and so frugal your house is usually less than 65 degrees, turn the oven on early and leave the dough on the stove above a warm oven). Allow to rise for 2 hours.

Place the dough in a bread pan and pre-heat the oven at 450. Let the dough rest for 40 minutes. Bake at 450 for 35 minutes. Let it cool before you cut it.

Quick Review: a Frozen Lasagna That Tastes Super Awesome

2011-04-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

I found this at Whole Foods. In keeping with my "Solve the Lunch Time Dilemma" work, I had to try it. I also tried Amy's Vegetable Lasagna - and this was clearly better. The sauce is more flavorful and the cheeses higher quality. The mozzarella actually looks like mozzarella before you pop it in the microwave. But what really makes this good microwave lasagna is the ricotta - it's the perfect texture.
It's $6/portion at Whole Foods- and as you can see Amazon actually has it for more (plus shipping). That might turn a few folks off, but you might give it a try and see if you think it's worth it. I'm eating it around once a week at this point.

Warning: Pasta Dough Recipe does not Work with an Extruder

2011-03-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

It was a horrible mess and then ruined the dough itself so I couldn't even turn into fettuccine.

After some internet research, apparently extruded pasta should be made with flour/water dough only and be way crumblier. I'll work on that and get back to you.

Updated Gluten Free Pasta Dough recipe

2011-02-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

1 cup quinoa flour
1 cup tapioca flour
1 1/2 teaspoon xantham gum
extra gf flour of your choice for dusting (although nothing too smelly - I use Silvanna's GF flour mix)
3 large eggs, beaten
1/2 teaspoon water

Throw the dry ingredients in a food processor (using pie dough blade, the plastic one) and pulse until well mixed. Add eggs, and pulse for about 30 seconds. If the dough is crumbly, add the water (I *always* end up adding the water). It should then form a great big dough ball that kind of travels along the inside of your food processor. If it's sticking to the sides or the blade, add a teaspoon or so of your dusting flour. (I've *never* done this).

Cut your dough into roughly four equal pieces. Roll out the first piece on a clean, dry surface floured with your GF flour. A countertop is best, you want something attached to the ground to give you leverage. Flour lightly! You don't need to add extra dryness but you don't want it stick either. Roll the piece out about double the width of your pasta roller and about 1/4 inch thick. Cut the pasta in half so that each piece is roughly the width of your roller (err on the side of smaller - you can always make it wider, narrower can only be done with another cut). I use a pizza cutter to get the line as straight as possible, even if it's really long.

Run the sheet through the roller at the widest part. Set the roller one size smaller and run the sheet through again until level 5. Don't bother trying level six, your pasta sheet will just shred. If the sheet isn't quite rectangular, you can always fold over the pasta and start over at the widest margin. I usually do at least two full passes through each size, sometimes three. Screw ups are easily fixed by just starting over - rolling out, etc. The nice thing about gluten free pasta is that no matter how much you roll out the pasta, you're not going to develop gluten.

Once you have a nice sheet, place it on a clean dish towel and cover it with plastic wrap to keep it from drying out and repeat with the rest of the dough.

Making a genoise gluten free, recipe

2011-02-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

I'm determined to never accept that a given recipe can't be made gluten free and delicious without at least attempting it. Frequently, my attempts have more and more often presented "Different, but good" results. This is one of them.

Genoise is a sponge cake that uses no chemical leavening and instead relies on air suspended in the batter during mixing. You can imagine that gluten is very useful in such a cake. At it's heart, the way the structure of baked goods is this: starch and protein work together to create a superstructure that at a microscopic level looks like bubbles of varying sizes stuck together. Baking is basically the art of creating those bubbles, filling them with air, and then solidifying them so the structure remains even if the pressure that made the bubbles is released. Think about the difference in a hot air balloon and a zeppelin. Gluten is a particularly good protein for making this structure because it's complex and wheat flour seems to have the perfect ratio of gluten to starch to make the textures we're used to. With yeast or baking soda or baking powder the bubbles that create air pockets are being created as it cooks (which is the process by which the stuff gets hardened). With a genoise, all the bubbles you're going to get are put in during the mixing. So through out the whole process, it's really important not to collapse your batter, whether your flour has gluten in it or not.

Genoise is the cake ladyfingers are made from and thus a good base for tiramisu. I haven't had tiramisu since BC (before celiac) - that's my eventual goal. I decided to attempt just the cake before attempting a full tiramisu - mascarpone is expensive and wasting it on a bad cake would be sad.

I started my efforts by speaking to a friend who has done a huge amount of cake bakery to ask about what flours to start with. She recommended I start with teff flour. I've never used teff flour before but I'd eaten things she'd made with teff and they were yummy, so I took her suggestion.

I wasn't especially experienced in baking prior to going gluten free, so some of these difficulties could be due to my inexperience rather than the imperfections of the ingredients, so it's possible the recipe that will follow may be perfectly good as is.

This recipe was adapted from the America's Test Kitchen Baking Book and because it's pretty complex.

My recipe:

1/2 cup white rice flour
1/2 cup teff flour
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1/2 teaspoon xantham gum
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 large eggs, room temperature (this is important)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 tablespoons unsalted butter (do not use salted), melted and cooled (do not put hot butter in this batter)

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and preheat to 350 degrees. Line the bottom of a springform pan with parchment paper and don't grease. Sift flours together with salt and xantham gum, making several passes through the sifter and whisking, until well mixed and as fluffy as you can make the flours. Set aside. If you melt the butter now, it should be properly cooled by the time we need it further on in the recipe.

2. In a large bowl, one small enough to fit across a saucepan but large enough to be suspended above the bottom of the pan, whisk the eggs and sugar together. Get a saucepan of water just simmering and set bowl on top of it, making sure the water doesn't touch the bottom of the pan. Heat the egg mixture, whisking constantly, until it's warm but not hot (think bathtub warm) or an instant read thermometer says 100 degrees. (1-2 minutes, says the original recipe, but mine took longer. The temp is more important than the time).

3. Remove from the heat and whip the mixture with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until very thick and voluminous - you want the batter to "ribbon" - fall in thick ribbons that rest on the top of the batter. 4-6 minutes. Compare how much fuller the bowl is from the previous picture. I probably could even have whipped it longer - the more whipped your eggs are the more denatured their proteins and the easier it is for them to form new bonds and get that structure you want. Whip in the vanilla.

4. Transfer 1 cup of mixture to a medium sized bowl and set aside. Sift half of the flour mixture over the remaining egg mixture and fold very gently wiht a large rubber spatula, 12 to 15 folds. The larger the spatula, the better. You want to turn over the maximum amount of batter for the minimum amount of agitation. Every stir pops bubbles and your batter is now as leavened as it's ever going to be. Sift the remaining flour in, and fold in very gently 8-12 folds.

5. Remember the butter and the reserved batter? Gently mix them together and then fold that into your batter as well. 4-6 folds

6. Immediately scrape batter into prepared springform, being careful not to deflate the batter- hold the bowl as close to the springform pan as possible (you may want help), and do not scrape the excess batter from the spatula into the pan. Don't jostle the pan and do not turn during baking. I placed the springform on a cool stove right above the oven so it moved a minimum amount after it was in the pan. Bake the cake until it turns a deep golden brown and a toothpick comes out with just a few crumbs on it, about 22 minutes.

7. Let the cake cool completely. If you want to turn it into a layer cake, I recommend freezing the cake in the springform pan and only removing it from the pan after it's frozen. Use a long knife to cut parallel to the bottom about half way up. If you have a bread knife longer than the diameter of your cake that's perfect, but we made do with a shorter one, making small delicate cuts in radii around the cake.

GF Bread, the next day

2011-01-30T12:32:00.000-08:00

Check out those nooks and crannies

I was warned that this bread wasn't good the next day - and it's certainly not as great but it's eminently edible. Here's some picks of the sammiches I made this afternoon.

Cute, huh? Small loaf, but it seems to support the structure best.

ZOMG, Yummy GF bread! (Recipe)

2011-01-29T17:24:00.000-08:00

One of the first people I talked to about re-adjusting to a GF lifestyle responding this way when I asked her what she did for bread: "I just don't eat bread anymore."

Even before I'd really delved deep in the world of no-gluten, I wasn't prepared to accept that. I had a lot to learn about gluten free products and baking and since then, I've made dumplings and I made homemade pasta, and I laughed at pie crust.

I think I threw away four pounds of homemade bread before I gave up on making anything worth eating. I figured I'd search for someone who could make GF bread - after all, bakery bread (with wheat, that is) is more amazing than anything you could make at home. You know as well as I do that's basically a no-go. There's one decent brand and it's not *really* bread anymore than twinkies are cake.

I was commiserating over just this problem with the ladies that run the Daring Donuts booth at the University District Farmers market (they're good, by-the-by) and Kit Topaz said, "Well, there's this one recipe..."

She emailed it to me and it took me almost 4 months to get around to it - first of all, it calls for millet
flour - and I had brown rice, white rice, sweet rice, tapioca, potato, corn, sorghum, and probably even more flours and was hesitant to add to my pantry. Then, I couldn't find it! Bob's Red Mill does make it, but Whole Foods doesn't stock it. I tracked it down at PCC and went ahead and bought some Teff flour at the same time (there's a crazy attempt at a genoise in my future).

I feel stupid for waiting so long! The bread came out looking exactly like the bread my dad used to make for dinner parties.

It tasted like it to.

And? THE TOP CRUNCHED WHEN I CHEWED IT.

This is not toasted bread. This is smooshy (but not gummy) soft bread from the oven. With little gas holes in it like *real* bread.

I'm so excited. My husband just keeps nodding and saying, "Yeah, it's good." He doesn't understand.

But you do, don't you, dear reader?

Notes: the recipe is a small loaf, maybe half a pound. I have been told it's not good day old, so small portions is a good thing. It mixes up easy, although it needs to rise longer than I've ever seen a GF bread recipe rise (perhaps this is part of its success?) and it bakes for just less than an hour. Weekend baking is good - weeknight baking if you're home a couple hours before you want dinner on the table.

I did not need to cook it the full 50 min... it was happy at 40.

Here it is:
French Italian Bread
From Gluten-Free Baking Classics by Annalisa Roberts

2 cups Bread Flour Mix A
1 ¼ tsp. xanthan gum
¾ - 1 tsp. salt
4 tsp. sugar
1 packet active dry yeast (not quick-rise)
2 tsp. olive oil
1 cup water, heated to 110° F

*Lightly spray or grease a 2 ½ wide French bread loaf pan and dust lightly with
white rice flour (spray and dust it over a paper towel if the pan has little holes in it).

Mix all dry ingredients in large bowl of electric mixer. Quickly add olive oil and
warm water (110° F) to the bowl; mix until just blended. Scrape bowl and beaters,
and then beat at high speed for 3 minutes. Spoon dough into prepared pan; cover
with a light cloth and let rise in a warm place (80°F is ideal) for 40 – 50 minutes or
until dough has slightly more than doubled in size.

Place rack in center of oven. Preheat oven to 400°F while bread is rising (do not use
a convection oven because it will brown the bread too quickly).

Bake bread in center of preheated oven for 40 – 50 minutes (35 – 45 minutes for
two smaller loaves). When done, bread should have a hollow sound when tapped
on the sides. Instant read thermometer should register 205-215°F. You can bake it
longer to make a thicker crust; the color will deepen and the internal temperature
will continue to rise. Remove bread from pan and cool on a rack at least 15 minutes
before slicing. The crust will soften a bit after the bread cools, but you can easily
recrisp it in the oven.

Bread Flour Mix A (makes 6 cups):
Millet flour 2 cups
Sorghum flour 1 cup
Cornstarch 1 cup
Potato starch 1 cup
Tapioca flour 1 cup

Gluten Free Baking Contest. My house. Tomorrow

2010-12-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

Flourless Chocolate Christmas Torte. F.T.W.

Overdue Review: Volterra in Ballard makes my heart pitter-patter..d

2010-12-09T18:39:00.000-08:00

I probably could say all I need to say about Volterra with this sentence:

They have in-house made GF pasta.

Squee!!

And it was good. Really good. That aside, the psychological benefit of going to an Italian restaurant and not having to completely ignore the pasta section (the section that before my Celiac diagnosis was my home) was like Christmas in the middle of October. The lamb ragu was so rich I only ate about a third of it, but boy it was good.

Little spendy - although not outside the realm of normal in Seattle, this is my new favorite restaurant in town.

Volterra
(Reservations available)
5411 Ballard Avenue NW
Tel : 206 789 5100
Fax : 206 789 5112

Review: Wheatless in Seattle

2010-12-09T17:01:00.000-08:00

I went to Wheatless in Seattle within days of getting my original celiac diagnosis. It came up on a search of Seattle gluten free. I had a bit of trouble finding them, because the place is a little stand-alone-bungalow on Greenwood Ave. Passed it at least twice.

I really should have kept on driving.

I thought maybe my original assessment - not terrible, but not enough to pull me back from the brink of newly-diagnosed-celiac-despair - might have been harsh and based on a lack of understanding of what can and can't be done well without gluten.

Turns out, my assessment was actually generous. Now that I've done a fair bit of gluten free baking and a lot of gluten free shopping, I was actually shocked at what they were passing off as commercial-grade baking. Their "french" bread was about an inch think by 4 inches wide and looked like my first attempt of gluten free bread. I bought a mint brownie and a rum ball - after spending $6, I threw them away half eaten. I could make better baked goods in my sleep.

Wheatless in Seattle is terrible. Don't go. Don't listen to any food recommendations from anyone who says they're good.

Recipe: Gluten-free Chicken and Dumplings

2010-11-15T20:45:00.000-08:00

"We should take a picture for the blog..."

[empty pot]

"Oops."

I've written before that you should just try to make your old recipes with gluten free ingredients. I'd been holding off on trying chicken and dumplings on the worry that the dumplings wouldn't fluff. The resulting dumplings weren't identical to my wheat dumplings - they were gummier or chewier but it was kind of awesome just the same. Different but good - which I think is the best you can hope for in GF cooking.

Recipe!

Chicken stew:
3-4lbs chicken pieces, bone-in (cut up whole chicken or thighs are best)
1 teaspoon sage
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 medium onion, cut into wedges
3 cups water1 packet bullion (optional, but yummy)
1/2 lb mushrooms, sliced (optional)
2 ribs celery, sliced thin

2 carrots, peeled and sliced thin

Dumplings:
1/3 cup white rice flour
1/3 cup quinoa flour
1/3 cup tapioca starch
1/4 teaspoon xantham gum
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoon shortening
1/2 cup buttermilk

Skin chicken. Combine water, sage, bullion, bay leaf, onion, and chicken in a dutch oven. Bring to a boil. Turn down heat and simmer for 25 minutes. Add celery, mushrooms and carrots. Return to a boil. Turn down and simmer for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk dry dumpling ingredients together. Cut shortening in until the mixture resembles coarse crumbles. Mix in buttermilk. Mixture should be a kind of lumpy wet thing.

Arrange the chicken on top of the vegetables and place dollops of dumpling on top of chicken and keep it mostly out of the broth. Recover and cook for 12-15 minutes or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean.

Review: Betty Crocker's Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix...or Please Don't Tell My Mom I Made Chocolate Chip Cookies From a Mix

2010-10-31T20:18:00.000-07:00

I feel like I came into the gluten-free world at a watershed moment. All of a sudden, it's everywhere. Now, it's even being marketed by as mainstream a company as General Mills. General Mills began certifying and labeling their corn chex and rice chex cereals as gluten free only a couple months before my diagnosis and when I was doing the pantry-purge we've all done it was a great relief and comfort to have my favorite cereal stay on the shelf.

That's why I wanted to try the cookie mix, Mom, I swear. It was to support General Mills' and their reaching out to me and the GF community. I've not turned into a lazy, incompetent monster.

Cookies are the first thing I was taught to bake. My mother never used recipes because she had them all memorized. Cookies are incredibly simple to make. Cream the sugars, add the vanilla and flour and any leavening, add the oats, raisins, chocolate chips, whatever, scoop, bake, tada. My mother was always horrified by the pre-made cookie dough - she saw it as evidence of an indulgent society similar to that which brought down the Roman Empire. If my mother knew I'd bought a cookie mix, she'd stop speaking to me.

That said, I'm buying more. I'm an adult, now, Mom. I can make my own decisions. And gluten free baking can be tough - a lot more ingredients needing the exact right ratios. Baking mixes make me feel just a little more normal.

And DAMN these were good cookies! Could I tell they were gluten-free? Just barely. My husband checked the box because he was afraid I'd accidentally poisoned myself. They came out of the oven warm and chewy and cooled to crispy. The ingredient list reads like my mother's recipe, except instead of wheat flour, it's got rice flour, potato flour, and potato starch and xanthan. You add butter, vanilla and an egg. You could make them vegan if you wanted to, with egg substitute and margarine or crisco instead of butter. It took me longer to clean the bowl than it did to get the cookies in the oven.

Betty Crocker has a number of GF baking mixes at this point - buy them. Maybe they'll make more!

Besides. Mom's 180 miles away. She doesn't have to know.

Oh crap, does she read my blog?

Simple Substitutions

2010-10-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

The longer I've been cooking gluten free, the more confident I am in my ability to take non-gluten free recipes and simply modify them on the fly to make them gluten free.

My husband has gotten better at it, too - often a standard recipe needs at least two gluten free treatments before it's quite right, but sometimes it's great off the bat.

For dinner last night, my husband made a mushroom quiche and a bread pudding. Pie crust can be tough gluten free - but the bottom half always turns out great, so quiche is an excellent gluten free dinner. Gruyere baked into the bottom, chanterelle mushrooms and some green onions in egg and it's a vegetarian marvel.

Oh, but the bread pudding.

Bread pudding doesn't sound like it could be gluten free. Gluten free bread has been really tough for me to get a handle on. A few weeks ago, I got a Groupon for Great Harvest Baking Co and preordered some gluten free white bread and a loaf of cinnamon chip bread. I'd bought some several months ago and it'd been awesome. Apparently they've changed their recipe because by the time I got the (rather expensive) bread home, half of it had crumbled and more of it did as I sliced it. I was despondent. My husband was inspired.

Bread pudding is a custardy dessert to use up stale bread. Chunks of bread and bread crumbs get mixed with egg and cream and sugar and baked. M just used the standard recipe from New Best Recipes and swapped standard bread for gluten free bread. He soaked raisins in bourbon and used cinnamon chip bread (and some standard white bread so it's not TOO cinnamon) and soaked the whole thing with custard. He also turned the broiler on for the last few minutes to toast the top.

I'm eating some for breakfast this morning. It's amazing. And we didn't need a special gluten free recipe or special instructions.

Not everything works with a simple substitution, but who knows? Give it a try. You'll start to get a better sense of what will work.

Adventures in homemade gluten free pasta 3, the Lasagna-ing

2010-10-12T19:54:00.000-07:00

So I made up a batch of my homemade pasta in sheets for tonight's lasagna. You can make any kind of lasagna you want - this is what mine looked like:

Looks like a lasagna, doesn't it?

Was the recipe the ideal? Michael raved about the lasagna and thought it was wonderful. Being the super picky person that I am, I'm not sure...there was a bit of a flavor. I'm not sure if the ratios are right.

Compared to the recipe I read (versus the one I wrote), the pasta dough was WAY easier to deal with and much more like wheat flour. The texture was pretty darned close, too. Amanda at Whole Foods warned me that I might find the quinoa flour a little bitter. Now, "bitter" is not the word I'd use to describe the taste, but I lack a really deep taste vocabulary (something I've always wished they gave a class in at the local community center) so I'm not sure how to describe it. Suffice to say, Michael couldn't taste anything but what you're supposed to taste in lasagna, so I'm not prepared to hide the recipe from other people, but neither am I quite ready to make the same exact thing over and over forever amen.

Adventures in homemade gluten free pasta, PART 2

2010-10-12T19:44:00.000-07:00

After seeing that homemade GF pasta recipes existed, I decided to try my own. Knowing how much I liked the quinoa corn pasta, I thought that maybe I'd use those as bases for a homemade pasta.

I talked for a bit with Amanda from Whole Foods Roosevelt Square and she suggested that I probably should include some starch. As tapioca starch is one of the more neutrally flavored, I went with that. For simplicity sake, I just did a third of each ingredient. Here's the recipe:

Allison's Gluten Free Homemade Pasta

1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon Quinoa Flour
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon Corn Flour
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon Tapioca Starch
2 teaspoons Xantham gum
3 eggs, beaten.
Water

Throw 1/2 cup of each of the flours and the gum into a food processor. I used the dough blade (plastic one). Pulse the dry ingredients to mix and aerate. Add the eggs. Make sure they're beaten really well first - it denatures the proteins and makes them available to form those structures that make dough ductile and malleable. Mix for about 30 seconds. If the dough looks like small pebbles, add water about a teaspoon at a time. If it sticks to the sides, add flour. I mixed up a small mount of my three flours (tablespoon each) in a mixing cup so I could flour my surface or adjust the texture of the dough.

Once the dough forms a rough ball, cover it in plastic wrap and let it rest. (I have NO IDEA if this is necessary for GF pasta, or if it's letting the gluten set up - but I did it anyway and it didn't hurt anything). Taking about a sixth at a time, roll out the dough on a clean counter top. When you've got it to about 1/8th of an inch thickness, trim to fit in your pasta roller if necessary and start rolling - begin at the widest setting and keep narrowing it and putting it through again. At setting 5, my dough started to fail so I left it a bit thicker. If it's coming apart, blistering, or ripping, try folding the sheet in half and starting over at the widest setting.

When your sheet is where you want it, place it on a clean dish towel under plastic wrap to keep it from drying out.

You can find out how it tastes on the next post.

Adventures in homemade gluten free pasta.

2010-10-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

The first time I attempted to make fresh noodles it was with a pork ragu from the Best Slow and Easy Recipes from the people at Cook's Illustrated. The idea being if the pasta sucked, at least the sauce would be amazing.

Probably not a good idea to actually expect your pasta to suck.

The pasta recipe came from Artisanal Gluten-Free cooking. This cookbook does something that I think is fundamentally a mistake commonly made when trying to do a full line of gluten free recipes: rather than look at the recipe and the flavors at play and specializing the combination of flours to suit the recipe, it gives a single recipe for a GF flour mix (in this case chiefly brown rice and sorghum) and uses the same one for bread and cake as pasta and fried chicken batter. The result is predictable: it works better for some things than others. The crepes were amazing, the bread was middling, the pasta was too sweet.

Furthermore, the pasta dough was incredibly difficult to work with. The crumbling we've all come to expect from gluten free pasta becomes especially annoying when trying to pass a long sheet of pasta through a pasta roller.

But it was an excellent start and Michael certainly enjoyed the flavors involved. I'm much harder to please and thought the pasta was on the bad side of ok.

I actually recommend their GF flour mix for a "Just thicken this sauce a bit" and "dust that with flour" uses - it's relatively neutral and has a decent texture. But when it's pasta or bread or something else that is *chiefly flour* it varies with the application.

It did however, make me want to try my own pasta recipe...

Review: Schar Gluten Free Tagliatelli

2010-10-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

I took a trip through Lindonberry Market in Vancouver, WA a few months back. This pasta was recommended by one of the people there.

Schar pasta uses a corn/rice mixture in its flours.

It sat in our cupboard for a very long time until my birthday when my husband attempted to make gluten free beef stroganoff and we needed something like egg noodles. The stroganoff was a mixed success but the noodles were..

Well, I've decided any time anyone tries to get me to eat a gluten free pasta that isn't ancient harvest, I will run the other direction.

Slimy, limp, and still chewy in the middle.

That's about the time I decided I needed to learn to make fresh gluten free pasta.

Gluten-Free Tour of Frozen Foods Day 4: Ian's Chicken Nuggets

2010-10-12T18:29:00.000-07:00

There's something inherently problematic about seeking out kid-friendly, gluten free convenience foods. The more adjectives you tack on, the narrower the field and thus the more likely that'll moderately or severely suck. From back in August when I bought them, I have purchased additonals of just about everything besides the Ian's.

That said, the Chicken Nuggets were better than the corn dogs and cooked up considerably better. Crispy-ish and the chicken ...was...well, the corn dogs were terrible and these were less terrible.

Convenience is fair to middling - as it goes to the oven, rather than the microwave. But most people don't see Ore Ida (which are probably gluten free now that I think about it) as being "inconvenient to prepare."

2 servings per box, I was full on 1.5 so that's a decent filling rating for a kids' food. Cost is a bit high in that it's about $4.50 per box.

Verdict: Decent choice for children, semi-lame choice for grownups. I'd rather make homemade fried chicken.

Gluten-Free Tour of Frozen Foods Day 3: Amy's Rice Macaroni & Cheese

2010-10-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

Early in my GF career I tried Annie's box mac and cheese. It was horrific. It made me cry, literally. For whatever reason, my husband was not home (prolly on a bike ride), I got home late and I was starving. All I wanted was Kraft Dinner. I tried Annie's instead. The resulting water sauce and scaly pasta was very, very sad.

If Annie's is Kraft Dinner, Amy's is Stouffers and fairs considerably better. I've been eating it most weeks for awhile now. The sauce is quite flavorful and the noodles, especially considering my near universal hatred for rice pasta, are pretty good. The thicker cut noodles seem to help keep the texture.

From freezer to microwave to table in about 5 minutes, convenience is very high. The portions are just about $3.50 a serving (but can be found cheaper at Fred Meyers and even occasionally go on sale).

Filling factor is very good. Mac'n'Cheese has always been one of my favorite comfort foods (hence the attention paid to making my own recipe) and this GF freezer version doesn't leave me wanting in the slightest.

Highly recommended.

Note to my single follower: vegan GF version available. I haven't tried it, but you're welcome to!

Gluten-Free Tour of Frozen Foods Day 2: Kettle Cuisine Chicken Noodle Soup.

2010-10-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

So I fell down on the job. I ate the food so the review is valid, if tardy. Get ready!

Kettle Cuisine does a whole line of soups (including several vegan varieties) and the full line is gluten-free. I tried the chicken soup because, you know, chicken noodle is the quintessential soup.

I had a stomach flu a few months back. It was the first time that I was really, really sick and off gluten. I had absolutely no idea what to eat - no saltines, no liptons cup a soup...

This soup is worth keeping around for just such an occasion. It's probably the best convenience soup I've ever had. The noodles are a bit fall-apart but so much like what homemade noodles are like that I can't begin to call that a set back. The broth is delicious without being too salty. Vegetables stay toothy enough.

It goes from freezer to microwave, no problem, so the convenience factor is high.

Filling factor is medium high - about what you'd expect for soup. I recommend eating it with some fresh fruit or a yogurt to round out the meal.

Each serving is $3.70. A bit steep but not bad in the grand scheme of the GF.

Verdict is, recommended.

The reasons you should get tested, rather than just going off gluten.

2010-10-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

More people than just celiacs are going on gluten-free diets these days. I'm of two minds about it - from a self-interested stand point, I'm pretty happy. A larger market means more stuff that's gluten free - larger market means the crap gets out-competed. That's good.

But. Dude. If you can eat wheat. Do it! It's good.

Alas, there's you and me. Not everyone who gets a benefit from a gluten free diet is celiac, however. And some people don't know.

This is why I think before you engage in a gluten-free diet, you should get not just a serological (blood) test, but an endoscopy.

Point 1:

For the tests to be accurate, you need to have been eating gluten.
The difference between a person with celiac and a person without celiac goes away with a gluten free diet. That's one of the nice things about having *this* diagnosis. It's completely treatable. But it also means if you have celiac and no gluten, you're going to get a false negative. False negatives are dangerous. False negatives make you think that some day, maybe you can eat wheat again. Which brings me to...

Point 2:

Celiac is a life-long disease. Allergies and intolerance are not. If you've got Celiac when you're 20, you've got Celiac when you're 80. However, many people grow into and out of allergies at different times in their lives. I recently discovered I can eat pecans and hazelnuts again. If you go off gluten, find all your symptoms are alleviated and 3 years later, think "Well, maybe I can eat gluten again" - if you had an allergy, you're probably right. If you had celiacs, you're wrong, wrong, wrong and it can cost you dearly.

Point 3:

Celiac sometimes has no overt symptoms

I got diagnosed because my dad was diagnosed. I had no symptoms at first. An allergy is only its symptoms - you can't have no symptoms and still have an allergy, but celiac can lurk.

Celiac is more or less localized to your duodenum where a large part of your digestion and absorption happens. It happens in tiny little hairs called villi that stick out into your intestines and make the surface area of your intestines very, very large. Those hairs are where you digest, where your enzymes that break down food get produced, etc. That's what celiac attacks - they flatten out. But not uniformly and not all at the same time. They're also constantly healing and an adult body can compensate for a very long time.

Babies and children have so much smaller intestines than they can't compensate and they get sick faster and worse. In the bad old days, when celiac was considered a childhood disease, the only people who got diagnosed were children who showed what's called "failure to thrive." They would be put on a gluten free diet, and miraculously start growing again and developing and the world would be wonderful. 12 years later, their pediatricians declared them cured. With their much-larger intestines, they're able to compensate and it may be decades before they showed any symptoms again.

Most of us have heard of the lymphoma associated with untreated celiac. It was probably one of the things that made me take my diagnosis seriously (along with it being the cause of the majority of unexplained infertility). The formation on our white blood cells that warp the gliadin into a toxin warps into a carcinogenic toxin. Bit by bit, we're putting carcinogens into our bodies. But there's no relationship to severity of symptoms and likelihood of developing cancer.

Those children who were diagnosed, put on a gluten free diet, and then told they were cured are those most affected by this particular lymphoma. They had the longest amount of time with active (as opposed to laten) celiac and had the highest exposure to gluten.

Point 4:

Celiac is genetic. Your chance as a member of the general public of having celiac disease is about 1 in 135. If you've got a first order relative who has been diagnosed, it's 1 in 20. Some docs say 1 in 10. And if you're diagnosed with celiac, you may have family members who are celiac as well. My dad's diagnosis led to me being diagnosed incredibly early in the progression. My symptoms were never too severe and I was able to control them. If you've got symptoms, and get diagnosed, you might save your mom, dad, sister, brother, or child some level of discomfort.

Point 5:

If it's not Celiac, wouldn't you like to eat baguette again?

When I was first diagnosed, it felt like a death sentence. I'd be going around my daily life and see something I wanted to eat and think, "Not just not now. Never. Ever. Never-never-never." Never get to go to Saint Cupcake, never eat a pain au chocolate, no kraft mac n cheese, no eating out without interrogating the waiter first. People who are gluten free for vanity have no idea. But if it's an intolerance or an allergy, in three years you might try a little taste and see how it makes you feel. You have hope. You have something to look forward to. Wouldn't you like to know if that's the case?

I know you may not bother, still, many people don't think it's worth it - especially if they've already gone gluten free and had some relief. Know what you're giving up and know what the alternatives are.

Frozen Food Tour Day 1: Ian's Popcorn Turkey Corn Dogs

2010-08-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

I love corn dogs. I haven't been able to eat them nigh on a decade. Well before my celiac diagnosis I developed a pretty nasty sensitivity to nitrites. I picked these up not just because they were gluten free but because the turkey dogs have no nitrites in the ingredient list. 24 hours from now I can tell you if the really don't have nitrites :).

This is a new brand for me. Ian's Natural Foods does supposedly healthy kids foods. The corn dog bites area really high in protein (18 g per serving), relatively low in fat.

Taste: Meh. The hot dogs were decent but the batter had a bit of a chalky mouthfeel and lose their crispiness very quickly after cooling. I don't imagine anyone under 12 would care, though. Good taste for kid-friendliness.

How filling? The package holds 2 servings - I more or less assumed I'd need to eat the whole thing to get full. Halfway through it I realized I was done. So, pretty well filling.

Price: $5.99 for two servings. Not terrible.

Convenience: These are not microwaveable and require an oven and a cookie sheet - if you've got a real kitchen to cook in, the ten minute cooking time is very convenient but won't work if you're cooking in a typical corporate breakroom.

Verdict? Recommended for kids, most adults will want more

Allison's Gluten-Free Tour of Whole Foods' Frozen Food Section

2010-08-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

"Lunch is the hardest meal to do gluten-free"

Sandwiches, corn dogs, hamburgers, pizza...

Breakfast can be done, dinner can actually be fun to figure out but lunch, the meal we're most likely to be out of the house for is consistently the hardest to manage gluten free. We swear we're going to cook a large amount on the weekends and freeze in individual portions for lunches, but it never happens. Besides, how many days in a row can you eat what you made 5 servings of on Sunday?

For awhile, I tried sitting in the frozen food section, reading ingredient list after ingredient list and eliminating possibility after possibility.

So I decided to just go down the frozen section and just pull one example of every promising-look gluten free lunch item. I picked about 8 and I will review each one as I eat them over the course of the next (approx) week.

They'll be judged on the following criteria:

Taste
Filling
Price
Convenience

First one up: Ian's Popcorn Turkey Corn Dog

Review: Glutino Gluten Free Chocolate Covered Pretzels

2010-08-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

I've tried Glutino products before - including the wafer cookies that are kind of like kit kats and a couple other things and have always been underwhelmed, so when I tried the Gluten Free Chocolate Covered Pretzels, I was not just surprised but blown away with how delicious and complex and flat out better than almost every chocolate-covered pretzel I've ever tried. The pretzels are nice and crunchy, the chocolate is real chocolate and not "chocolate flavoring", and the salt is sea salt so slightly larger chunks than table salt but not over big. I actually pulled the bag away from me to get a better look and said, "MmmmMMmm!"

Downside? Well, what do you think? $5.50 for 5 servings. You're going to have to decide for yourself it it's worthy it. I think *maybe* it is.

Recommended with reservations

Review: Julie's Organic Glutenfreeda Ice Cream Sandwiches

2010-07-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

This is not going to be a very creative or entertaining review - I wouldn't bother at all, except - OMG, you need to go get some.

The ice cream is smooth and creamy. The cookie tastes somewhere between your typical good humor ice cream sandwich and an Oreo.

My biggest complaint is the price - they're basically $1 for each and they're not very big. But if you're mourning the loss of the GoodHumor man, it's worth it.

They're available exclusively through WholeFoods.

Gluten Free Ham and Swiss Sandwich Bake - recipe and bake report

2010-07-20T18:16:00.001-07:00

Well! I did it! I made a gluten free version of my favorite meal-in-a-loaf. The dough turned out a bit tough, but it's pretty delicious. The swiss cheese melts into the crust and keeps it goey and moist. Here's the process I went through:

I put together the water, the yeast, the mustard, and butter first and sifted together my flours and xanthan gum - the proper moisture level was a challenge. The recipe that comes at the end of this post reflects me kind of screwing up the flour/wet ingredients ratio at the beginning. So, it doesn't hang together perfectly, but if you get the flour enough that the sides are dry but the dough isn't crumbly, you're golden.

.
I then rolled the dough out on a piece of parchment - I had originally planned to do this really elaborate lattice overlay thing but it looked so much like the wheat version that I just went with it and sprinkled my bits down the middle.

So this was the moment of truth. You see, the way it's supposed to go is that you kind of braid together and it's lovely. I knew that the gluten free dough wasn't about to stretch and pull the way a wheat dough would have. So I did the slicing on the parchment and used the parchment to roll it up on either side.

It didn't turn out particularly attractive: . I may have to work on this and maybe do a more calzone-like foldover in the future.

Final product:

Not as brown as I wanted - but I didn't egg wash it and none of the gluten flours I use brown on their own.

Things I'll do differently next time:

Roll it out thinner.
Add extra mustard and salt
Bake at 400
Egg wash

Ok, the recipe!!!

1.25 cup Brown Rice Flour
1.25 cup White Rice Flour
1 cup Tapioca Starch
.5 cup Sweet Rice Flour
1 tbsp xanthan gum

2 pckg yeast (4.5 teaspoons)
1 cup very warm water (about 125 degree F)
.25 cup dijon mustard
2 tbsp butter/margarine
2 tbsp sugar
.5 tspn salt

.5 cup diced ham
.5 cup shredded swiss cheese
.25 cup chopped dill pickled

An egg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Sift together the flour mix. Pour three cups of the flour mix in a mixing bowl.

Stir together the "Wet ingredients" until the salt and sugar dissolves. Pour wet ingredient mixture into the mixing bowl.

Using a stand up mixer, mix until well combined. Dough should leave the bowl sides clean but hang together and not crumble.

Roll out dough to a thickness of about a quarter inch (too thick and it'll make your finished product tough) on a piece of parchment, sprinkling both the rolling pin and the parchment with the excess flour mix. Sprinkle ham, then the cheese, then the pickle down the center third of the dough.

Traditional method: Slice dough on either side of the filling bits in parallel lines along the dough - pull the strips up over the filling and pinch together. This doesn't really work with GF dough, but I figured I'd put it out there.

Easier method that isn't as pretty: Fold over one side of the dough up over the filling and slice several air holes through the top.

Using the parchment paper as a little sandwich gurney (may want to get a friend to help) place on a baking sheet. Cover with a warm wet dish towel and allow to rise for 15 minutes. Wash the egg onto to the dough surface, avoiding any exposed filling bits.

Bake 35 minute or until done.

An experiment...

2010-07-20T12:21:00.001-07:00

Today I'm trying something pretty difficult.

I've had a favorite recipe since I was a kid and it was one of the first things I learned how to cook for my family - it's called ham and swiss meal-in-a-loaf. My uncle Steve used to call it, "Lot of work for a ham sandwich" - which is not to say it's not worth it.

It's a baked sandwich with a yeast risen dough, flavored with dijon mustard, stuffed with diced ham, shredded swiss cheese, and chopped pickle. I've decided to attempt to make a gluten free version tonight.

Although technically, my mac and cheese recipe is a GF conversion, swapping out the packaged pasta and the wheat flour for the roux doesn't take much finesse. This is the first time I'm using a wheat recipe as a guide line and going with some improvisation.

The issues I'm expecting to encounter:

The way the sandwich is put together, you roll out the dough, sprinkle the ham/cheese/pickle down the center, slice the dough on either side of the toppings and then bring them up around the toppings, pinching them together at the top. That's a lot of ductility you're expecting from a dough - something I'm not thinking is going to happen with a gluten-free dough.

The goal is to make a really golden brown crust - the original recipe calls for an eggwash. I don't know how an egg wash is going to affect the crust of a gf bread.

The ways I'm planning to handle these:

I think I'm going to roll out the dough on parchment, cut a lattice pattern into it on the dough, collect the cut out lattice pieces and roll them back out into a solid sheet on a different parchment and use that as the sandwich bottom. That way I can take the latticed bit, plop the whole thing dough-side-down on the assembled sandwich and press only the outside edges together. In my head, it looks like a turtle.

I'm going to up the amount of egg both in the recipe and the amount of egg wash I put on it. I think it won't hurt the crust, but it's still an experiment to see if it gives the results I want.

I'll have pictures and results tonight.

Wish me luck.

Review: Andean Dream Quinoa Pasta

2010-07-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

Andean Dream Quinoa, 16-Ounce (Pack of 10)Ancient Harvest Quinoa Corn pasta so I was curious when I saw a quinoa-rice pasta.

I prepared it in what is probably the hardest for a pasta to stand up to - with just a little grated parmesan, but it's my favorite lunch.

The short and long is that it's not terrible - it gets a little bit of the peeliness I've seen in other rice pastas. The flavor is pretty pure. But it's hard for it to be anything but almost over done - it cooks from the outside in and at a weird rate.

It's not replacing my Ancient Harvest for me, but if you hate corn or have a tummy problem with it, this is a decent alternative.

Gluten Free Stove Top Mac and Cheese IMPROVED

2010-07-19T11:01:00.001-07:00

Ok, so I've done this recipe now about half a dozen times and for many people both gluten free and not gluten free. Everyone likes it. I've perfected the process and the timing and now I have it so I can get the whole thing made in about 30 minutes. Which is pretty awesome. Because I have the timing down, I'm going to list the ingredients but everything else will be in a step-by-step instructions.

Ingredients:

8-12 oz of your fav GF pasta (mine is ancient harvest pagodas for this recipe and the timing is based on its cooking time)
2 tbs butter (soft is better)
1 tsp dry mustard
2 tbsp white or brown rice flour or a combination (the flavors are slightly different with one or the other but it's hard to say which is better)
1 tbs 4-6 cloves minced garlic (PREPARE AHEAD OF TIME)
2-3 cups milk (whole or 2% is best) (POUR INTO YOUR MEASURING CUP AHEAD OF TIME)
8 oz shredded cheese (a sharp cheddar is best)
1/2-1 lbs broccoli or asparagus

Get out three pans - one appropriate for steaming the veggies, one for the pasta, and one for the sauce. Fill a large pan for the pasta with water and turn burner on high to get the water boiling as soon as you can.

Prepare the veggies for steaming (I use a basket over a reservoir of water), close it up and place on stove but DO NOT TURN IT ON YET.

Get third pan out for sauce - small/shallow is better for heat transfer. Collect all your ingredients and get them close at hand and mix dry mustard into your measured flour. Wait until water for the pasta is boiling and dump in your pasta. Set the timer for 9 minutes, turn the heat under the vegetables on and start your sauce.

Melt the butter over medium heat. Dump in your flour a bit at a time, whisking (and yes, you want a whisk) all the time. You will be whisking for the next ten minutes or so, so pace yourself. It'll cook very quickly and burn very soon after that - keep your eyes open. The moment it turns blond, throw in your garlic and stir, stir, stir - stick your nose over the pan. When the garlic gets fragrant, dump in the milk and take a deep breath because the hectic bit is over. Take a moment to loosen up your pasta with a wooden spoon and see if the water is boiling under your veg. If it is, your veg will be done in 7 minutes. Keep an eye out.

Turn the heat under the sauce up. Stirring constantly, you want kind of tip the pan around so you can see if there are chunks (they'll get stuck in the corners - that's the value of the small whisk, you can usually scrape them out) and keep stirring until you reach a full bowl. From that moment, you want to count 5 minutes or until it reaches a thick heavy cream consistency. You've got some stretch squeeze time here so if your pasta finishes, that's fine, take a second from your stirring and drain it. If your veg finishes, just pull it off the heat and leave it closed.

Once you've reached your cream consistency, remove the sauce from the heat. If the other items haven't finished, finish them first (put a lid on your sauce to keep it hot) and stir in your shredded cheese a little at a time, letting it melt before you add the next bit. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve in individual bowls, layering pasta, then veg, then sauce. Serve and be amazed.

Shortcake for Summer Strawberries

2010-07-19T10:13:00.001-07:00

It's been too hot to turn on the oven lately, but I wanted to share one summer recipe. This comes from Easy Gluten Free Baking (and a bit of improvisation from yours truly).

First step: go find a local u-pick and pick fresh strawberries. Farmers market will do, but don't get any Albions. Those are the hard California strawberries designed to survive a truck trip up here. Always ask what variety of strawberries they have.

Slice those babies up and pour about 1/4 cup of sugar on them - stir just enough to coat.

Dry Ingredients

1.25 cups white rice flour
1 cup tapioca flour
.5 cup cornstarch
.5 cup sweet rice flour
2 tablespoons sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon soda
.5 teaspoons xantham gum

Wet Ingredients
5/8 cup butter (1.25 sticks), chilled and cut into pieces
1.25 cups butter milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper

Whisk dry ingredients in a large bowl

Using your fingers or pastry cutter, rub the chilled butter into dry ingredients until no large pieces remain and it resembles a coarse meal.

Pour buttermilk over mixture and stir until moistened.

Using a biscuit cutter to approximate size (rolling them out is counter productive) drop about .25 cups dough for each biscuit on the parchment, spacing about 2 in apart.

Bake for 15 minutes or until biscuits are golden brown.

They can be put it tupperware and refrigerated for about 4 days - serve warm or cold under strawberries and freshly whipped cream.

Trip to Bob's Red Mill!

2010-07-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

It's an eternal question - which is better for celiacs? Seattle or Portland?

There are arguments on both sides, certainly, but the proximity of Bob's Red Mill does throw the balance in Portland's favor.

I got a 24 oz bag of GF Quick Cooking Oats. I didn't even know they had them! I've been forcing myself to eat rolled oats.

Also, Portland has a blog that's actually following the stuff that's going on there - Seattle seems not to have such a good local resource. Hence my posting again!

Back in the Saddle: GF White Bread from Great Harvest

2010-05-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about Great Harvest is that they offer samples - just pop in and they'll offer you a slice of bread.

The Great Harvest on Sand Point Way does not have GF bread every day, and they only do the white bread by request. On Wednesdays, they generally do Buckwheat Honey Bread - but the day I went in, there was some surplus white bread from a special order. A slice was moist and chewy - yes, it had the tell-tale much-smaller bubbles typical of GF bread, but other than that, I was a little worried they'd made a mistake and given me wheat flour bread. I also bought some hamburger buns and froze 'em

West Seattle Great Harvest's Gluten-Free menu is rather extensive. http://www.greatharvestwestseattle.com/glutenfree.html You can check GreatHarvest.Com to find out what your local bakery's schedule is. Call them if the website isn't specific.

My loaf of bread was $7.25 - a little steep but I might actually FINISH this loaf.

Taste....95
Texture...90
Cost/Availability....70
Proximity...80

Indexed value: 84.4

Verdict: The price point sure is pointy - but I'm going to spend it.

A hiatus, now ended....

2010-05-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in awhile - two important happenstances: my honeymoon and a scheduled endoscopy that required I eat gluten. So, it seemed counterproductive to continue looking into gluten free foods.

Well, my GI called today. My celiac was confirmed.

On the positive note, my inflammation level was incredibly low. Just the three or so weeks of GF and only a week and a half of eating a wheatable diet and I almost had a false negative on the biospy. A GF diet is really effective if you catch celiac early.

So, I'm gluten free again.

Wee!

Review: New Cascadia Traditional Bakery (Portland, OR)

2010-04-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

This weekend I was back in my hometown of Portland Oregon and on the recommendation of my parents, I tried out New Cascadia Traditional Bakery on 6th and Market in SE Portland (across from the Goodwill).

Everything I tried there was well above your average GF fare. They had baguette, they had bagels, they do pizza in the afternoons, cupcakes, galettes...lots of different stuff.

My non-Celiac best friend and I split a margherita pizza on gluten-free crust. It was cracker thin and crispy. Not bad - I prefer a thicker crust but given the capriciousness of GF breads, this may be an excellent solution.

We also got a chocolate cupcake and a pear galette (the galette being kind of like a mini pie) - both were very, very good. The cupcake was indistinguishable from its wheated brethren and the galette, although not my taste was a hit with my friend.

We brought home a baguette and a bagel.

My overall impression is, "Man, I wish we still lived in Portland" but if I had a dollar for every time I thought that, I could probably buy myself a new immune system and then just eat whatever I wanted. As it is, being 200 miles away, I say "Go, check it out if you're in PDX. But us transplants in Seattle will just muster on without y'all."

Their main flours are brown and white rice and sorghum. I make a point of asking it hopes of doing a better job recognizing good recipes.

We ate the baguette after freezing it for a couple of days to keep it fresh. It's certainly dense, but the crust is exquisite and gives me hope for the future. My husband thawed it and revived it with a bit of water on the crust and a quick pop in the oven and served it with a delice de bourgogne cheese we had left over. A good 75% as delicious as it's wheat counterpart (granted, I've been spoiled when it comes to baguette by Grand Central Baking...)

The bagel was a bit lame. I suspect it would have been better if I'd eaten it there, but it was crumbly and over dense like many GF breads. But, not terrible. I give it 7.

Review: Ancient Harvest Quinoa Corn Pasta - pagodas

2010-04-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, celiacs and gluten intolerants of all shapes and sizes, I give you a solution to the spaghetti problem.

Ancient harvest quinoa-corn pasta has the flavor of, the texture of and WAY more nutrients than traditional semolina wheat pasta. Something like double the protein and triple the fiber. Price point is certainly going to be an issue with all the GF products, but if you get it from amazon in large quantities, it's about 1.5x the price of wheat pasta, rather than 3x.

I got my Ancient Harvest pasta at Whole Foods. The above link is to amazon's grocery.

Tips and tricks: Cook it longer than it says. 2-3 min longer. Keep taste-testing, though because it's apparently not good if you overcook it. I haven't managed to do that, yet, so I don't think it's easy to do.

Taste....100
Texture...100
Cost...totally reasonable, when you consider the nutrient density.
Proxmity...100

PERFECT PASTA!

My recipe for Gluten Free Stove Top Mac and Cheese

2010-04-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

...and review of Ancient Harvest Quinoa-Corn pasta.

1/4 cup butter
1 Tbsp or so Corn Starch (sifted to prevent clumps)
2 cups milk
5-6 minced garlic cloves
1 tsp dry mustard
8 oz shredded cheese (cheddar is what I use - but I also like half jack/half cheddar)
12 oz Ancient Harvest Quinoa-Corn pasta pagodas, cooked and drained (you can use elbows, if you're lame)
Optional: steamed asparagus or broccoli, around 2 cups

Start with a bechamel. Melt butter in medium sauce pan or dutch oven on medium high heat until bubbling. Sift corn starch (other recipes recommend white rice/brown rice mixes) into butter a little at a time until thickened, stirring all the time. Continue stirring. The sauce should turn blond. Add garlic and mustard - but only cook long enough for the garlic to turn fragant. Add milk and continue stirring. Bring sauce to full boil, still stirring and let cook for about 5 minutes - the sauce should thicken to the consistency of heavy cream.

Off the heat, begin adding the shredded cheese a little at a time and stir into the sauce to melt it.

Add pasta to your sauce and stir to coat. Serve and enjoy!

Optional: if I'm adding steamed vegetables, I like to serve it this way: Put pasta in individual bowls, layer veggies on top and then add the cheese sauce. Just know that the left overs are best if the pasta and the noodles hang out alone.

My husband said this was identical to the non-GF mac and cheese I make and with quinoa pasta you get more fiber and protein. So Woo Hoo!

Review of meal that HAPPENS to be GF: Michael's Chicken and Asparagus Almost-No-Stir Risotto

2010-04-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

I don't know that I've mentioned how awesome my husband is. I think many husbands would respond to a celiac diagnosis with no outward symptoms by encouraging their wives to ignore the restrictions and eat what was convenient. My husband wants me to be healthy and happy. And when those things are in conflict, he wants me to be healthy. I've asked him to be in charge of finding new foods that happen to be GF (rather than the ersatz "pretending to have wheat" foods that I've been focusing on).

In the current (Jun10) issue of Cooks Illustrated, we found a recipe for Almost Hands-Free Risotto with Chicken and Herbs.

Serves 6. Published May 1, 2010. From Cook's Illustrated.

Adding chicken breasts to the risotto turns a side dish into a main course. Be aware that the thinner ends of the chicken breasts may be fully cooked by the time the broth is added to the rice, with the thicker ends finishing about 5 minutes later. If you prefer a brothy risotto, add the extra broth in step 6.

Ingredients
5 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 cups water
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 bone-in, skin-on chicken breast halves (about 12 ounces each), each cut in half crosswise
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 large onion , chopped fine (about 1 1/2 cups)
Table salt
1 large garlic clove , minced or pressed through garlic press (about 1 teaspoon)
2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup dry white wine
2 ounces grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon juice from 1 lemon
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
Ground black pepper
Instructions

1.

1. Bring broth and water to boil in large saucepan over high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low to maintain gentle simmer.
2.

2. Heat olive oil in large Dutch oven over medium heat until just starting to smoke. Add chicken, skin side down, and cook without moving until golden brown, 4 to 6 minutes. Flip chicken and cook second side until lightly browned, about 2 minutes. Transfer chicken to saucepan of simmering broth and cook until instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part registers 165 degrees, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer to large plate.
3.

3. Add 2 tablespoons butter to now empty Dutch oven set over medium heat. When butter has melted, add onion and 3/4 teaspoon salt; cook, stirring frequently, until onion is softened but not browned, 4 to 5 minutes. Add garlic and stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add rice and cook, stirring frequently, until grains are translucent around edges, about 3 minutes.
4.

4. Add wine and cook, stirring constantly, until fully absorbed, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir 5 cups warm broth into rice; reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until almost all liquid has been absorbed and rice is just al dente, 16 to 18 minutes, stirring twice during cooking.
5.

5. Add ¾ cup warm broth to risotto and stir gently and constantly until risotto becomes creamy, about 3 minutes. Stir in Parmesan. Remove pot from heat, cover, and let stand for 5 minutes.
6.

6. Meanwhile, remove and discard skin and bones from chicken, and shred meat into bite-size pieces. Gently stir shredded chicken, remaining 2 tablespoons butter, lemon juice, parsley, and chives into risotto. Season with salt and pepper to taste. If desired, add up to ½ cup additional broth to loosen texture of risotto.

We threw in some bite sized steamed asparagus when we added the chicken. Big hit with even the picky eater (me) and guests!!

Review: Pamela's Pancake and Baking Mix

2010-04-24T12:23:00.000-07:00

Ooooh...yummy....

I made crepes with Pamela's Pancake and Baking Mix - you add an egg, a tbsp of oil (maybe butter next time?), and 1 1/3 cup water to a cup of baking mix and it makes super yummy crepes.

The pancake mix includes almond meal which leaves little brown flecks (like almond skins) in the batter. I think it makes them beautiful but it also gives a nutty roundness to the batter that makes it just a little sweet.

Crepes are probably not the very best use of the mix - it's more viscous than a wheat-based crepe batter and thus doesn't flow quite so well on to the pan, but it's still delicious and probably just makes super awesome pancakes.

My parents recommended this mix and say that both pancakes and waffles made with this mix are wonderful as well.

How does it compare to my typical wheat-flour crepe recipe? They're not identical, obviously - the GF batter has little tiny holes in it that make the crepes spongy. I actually think I may prefer the GF batter in certain moods.

It's got the same difficulty as many GF products - gluten is an amazing cohesive agent and it keeps the crepes together better than anything a GF product can offer. What this means is that you need to be kind of careful of the size and shape of your crepes - they need to be nice and round, a significant space between the edge of the crepe and your pan, and you want to loosen the whole way around the crepe before you try to get your spatula - I shredded about half the crepes in my first attempt. Crepes that are too thick fall apart even worse. I think they cook a little faster than wheat crepes, so watch out for that. But even the shredded crepes were delicious - I just smooshed the chunks around with my homemade strawberry jam from last Summer and I'm so stuffed I can't talk.

I purchased the baking mix at Whole Foods for $3.69 for 1.5lbs - it's available in 4lb containers and I've seen this mix at PCC and Fred Meyer as well.

Flavor....100
Texture....90
Cost/Availability....80
Proximity...90

Indexed Value: 91 (lower due to proximity value - but I think it's different AND good)

Verdict: Go buy some. This is a must have item in a GF pantry - breakfast is saved!

Review: Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Chocolate Cake Mix

2010-04-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'll tell you right now - the batter reeks and it doesn't smell nearly as nice as traditional chocolate cake while baking, but after they're out of the oven, they're cupcakes. They're fluffy and light and moist and chocolately. I have found GF chocolate cupcakes and celiac seems a little less like a prison sentence.

Tips and Tricks:

It asks you to cream butter without sugars (since the sugar is already in the mix), which I think makes it more difficult so make sure your butter is nice and soft. It mentions on the package that everything should be room temperature. If you keep your house somewhat cooler than average, then warm stuff a bit.

It also calls for lemon juice and milk - if your household is like mine and you keep buttermilk around, you probably could skip that and it might avoid the flavor of garden peas that is in the batter and in the still-warm cupcakes. Probably still good to let them cool - the same slight scent that was strong in the batter was gone for the second cupcake.

I haven't tried to frost them - they might be too delicate for it. I may try to freeze one and then frost it with warm frosting, but for now they're just delightful little snack cakes.

Going forward, I think I'll make cupcakes from my own recipe with the Bob's Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Flour (it's a blend of like 6 different things and the major ingredient in this mix), if only to allow me to cream the butter and sugar. They obviously did an excellent job with this mix and it's kind of opened up a new world of baking possibilities for me.

If I were a better blogger, I'd have pictures. Next time I guess :)

Flavor ....95
Texture....100 (no, really, it's perfect)
Cost/Availability .... 80 (pricey like most GF products, but I got it at my local Whole Foods)
Proximity to real thing ... 90

Indexed Value....92

Woopie!

Having a difficult evening

2010-04-11T00:18:00.000-07:00

This was the first day I tried to go be social since my diagnosis. I made sure to eat a full good GF meal before I left the house. We ended up hanging out until 30 minutes before I had to leave for work - which means no food at home and I can't eat anything at my employer's home.

I actually bought a McDonalds Burger...it's still in my car. I didn't eat it.

I got home at 11 pm, starving, and tried Annie's Rice Pasta and Cheese.

I think I just hate rice pasta.

It doesn't help that my husband is out of town this weekend and I'm lonely and he does a better job taking care of me than I do myself.

I tried looking at some celiac forums - just looking for a bit of support. It's filled, as all internet forums are, with kooks and crackpots and folklore. I just felt that much more alone.

How could this possibly be the right thing for me if less than a week into it I want to quit? I'm not sick. I'm not fatigued or weak. I have no rashes, my intestinal problems add up to minor irregularity, and then I read this on webmd:

"What To Think About

Sometimes a person who has celiac disease does not have symptoms after eating foods that contain gluten. But damage to the small intestine is still occurring. Such damage prevents the absorption of needed nutrients, which may cause complications such as growth delays in children. The damage to the small intestine can also cause an increased risk for lymphoma in the intestine."

Maybe I do need the stupid endoscopic biopsy. But if it comes back positive, then what? Will I finally accept this?

I've been teasing my father saying I'm angry at him, as he's clearly responsible - both for the disease and the diagnosis. But in a way, I am angry at him. He was diagnosed at age 69. He had almost 7 decades of eating whatever the hell he wanted. I didn't even get my full 26 years - this wasn't my first food allergy.

Most people just eat food. They see it, they eat it. They pop into a 7-11 and get some Nutter Butters, they just order off the menu, whatever looks good. I search and search and search and ask the waitress to ask the cook to check the ingredients list and burn with embarrassment and end up sick anyway because I didn't ask the right questions.

And this was before I added "gluten" to the list of "Things Allison Can't Eat"

I'm hungry all the time. I honestly don't know what to eat. I don't know how to feed myself anymore.

Fully pre-GF diet breakfast

2010-04-10T11:11:00.001-07:00

Ham and cheese omelette.

See? Not everything has to change.

Review: Mrs. Leepers Corn Spaghetti

2010-04-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

Three words: Oh, thank God.

I am a pasta eater. I eat pasta. I ate pasta at least three times a week when I was single and I was getting up towards eating that frequently again after the baby I nanny for would go to sleep. I can go on at length about the relative advantages of one pasta shape over another - the greatest of all possible pastas being radiatore. The worst? Penne. Penne is for pasta neophytes. When my dad was diagnosed with celiac, I thought, "Poor bastard. Glad it's not me. How would I live without pasta?" One of the things I wailed at my husband when he got home and tried to tell me I would once again be happy some day, I said, "How could I be?? I can't eat spaghetti or cupcakes again for the rest of my life - and I'm bound to live at least another 50 years!"

I called my mother after the Tinkyadacalypse that if the corn pasta wasn't at least twice as good I was eating the semolina pasta that still lives in the pasta drawer (Yes. I have a pasta drawer...and it generally spills in a second drawer). Mrs. Leepers is not really pasta. Not really. But it has helped me step away from the ledge a little. I'm not violating the hallowed oath of gluten free tonight.

This was dinner trial number 2 this evening and I was starting to get pretty hungry. I cooked up Mrs. Leeper's Corn Spaghetti with my favorite jar sauce and about a third pound of ground beef. It stays very al dente, even after cooking it three minutes longer than suggested - which I think is a positive thing to a real pasta lover. The pasta is bright yellow in the packaged but it mellows while wheat pastas yellow - they end up pretty much the same color, which was comforting to me. I really thought I'd have to have strange colored pasta.

It retains a corn-chip-like/authentic tostada-like flavor - it's subtle and an aftertaste but it's there. If I got used to it, I might be able to go back to my "just shaker cheese (kraft grated parmesan) and butter" that was my preferred preparation for the wheat pasta. As it is, I'll probably stick with a good marinara. I'd recommend salting the water before you boil it - the corn pasta is a bit bland.

Otherwise, a satisfying dinner. And I don't have to kill myself - either slowly but cheating on my diet or quickly by taking long walk off a short pier. I can save that for another day. (Price $3.69 at Whole Foods)

Flavor...70
Texture....75
Cost/Ease....60
Proximity to real thing ... 70

Indexed Value...70

Verdict; I will be buying more. And you probably could, too.

Review: Tinkyada Brown Rice Pasta

2010-04-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

Remember the lady who suggested the acupuncture and I thought she was bonkers?

I tried the pasta she recommended tonight.

When will I learn to follow my instincts?

The package is covered with highly disturbing overly cheerful comments not culturally appropriate in the United States. We let food speak for itself - you tell us it's "healthy", you tell it's "yummy" and we think, "Why are you trying so hard to convince us? Are you hiding something?" That's why I never, ever ate at the Healthy Asian Food (actually it's name, painted on the wooden sign) cart at Portland State. It'd be liable to kill me.

Actual quote, punctuation included:

"JUST RIGHT! Perfect for a light and tasty family meal, for serving your loved ones and guests who are sure to appreciate, with joy!"

I really feel like it's the comma after "appreciate" that brings it home.

Ok, so here's how it went.

Water brought to boil, instructions say "cook for 16-17 minutes" - it also says the pasta can stand up to overcooking...in fact it says "quite a bit of over-cooking" but I think we've already established the lack of credibility of what's written on the package. At ten minutes, it reeks, it's slimy, the outside layers are peeling off, and the inner core is raw. Ever see a hair strand in a microscope?

Like that.

Needless to say I didn't eat it.

We'll try the Mrs. Leeper's corn pasta. I had to scrub the pot I made the first batch of pasta in because of the glutenous (ironic, no?) mess it made.

Flavor...0
Texture....-5
Cost...who cares?
Proximity...0

Verdict: I"ll be honest, I got some satisfaction out of finding a truly horrible GF product - all this half-bad, not half-bad stuff was depressing me.

Review: Pamela's Bread Mix

2010-04-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

This recommendation came to me from Pam at the University Bookstore. She was so sure I'd like it, she told me to call her and tell what I thought.

Pamela's is a pretty common brand - I've seen some representation of the brand at Whole Foods, PCC, and even Fred Meyers. The bread mix was pretty easy - it comes with its own yeast packet. You add water, egg, and oil and mix in a stand mixer.

It's generally tasty with a crust that tastes just like the homemade bread my dad used to make (before celiac). One problem: I didn't let the bread rise enough so it's a bit dense and gummy. When we pulled it out of the oven it was all puffed up, ten minutes later it had collapsed. So, I'm not sure if this is the bread's fault or mine, so I'll be trying this mix again.

I was hoping to have a good sandwich bread - so I tried this with a ham and cheese sandwich for my lunch today. Good flavor, good texture (besides the gumminess) - the loafs are kind of small and so the sandwich is small. I'm going to try to find a way to do bigger loafs, but I can recommend this bread - especially if you like the slightly sweet taste of homemade whole wheat bread.

Price: $3.60

Flavor...80
Texture....60
Cost/Ease....80
Proximity to real thing....80

Indexed value: 75

Rant: A new place for gluten to be hiding

2010-04-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

...the ingredient list for your high quality/high priced shampoo that gives your hair life and body and hydrates weightlessly.

Also: my favorite cleanser of all time, which I just bought a brand new 15 month supply of.

So, along with food, I guess I'll be reviewing hair and skin care products to replace the ones I have to get rid of.

Ciao for now...

UPDATE: Mayo Clinic says gluten can't be absorbed through the skin, so as long as your lipsticks are gluten-free, put all the gluten you want in your hair.

Rave: Review of Lucy's Chocolate Chip Cookies

2010-04-08T18:49:00.001-07:00

It's possible. A few short days into my search I found a truly yummy packaged cookie.

Dr. Lucy cookies are nut-free, milk-free, egg-free, sweetened with cane juice as well as gluten free and they do analysis to ensure the gluten-free-edness. So yea for them.

But yea for me in that the cookies are wonderfully sweet and crispy - they avoid the milk in the chocolate chips by just making them dark chocolate chips. Oh, the horror and the sacrifice!

The only downside as far as I can tell is the price point - almost $4 for a 5.5oz package.

I got mine at PCC Markets in Fremont. Amazon's got them in lunch-sized packs: Lucy's Cookies http://amzn.com/B003D89F1G for a little more than $1 per 1.25 oz pack.

Lucy's also comes in sugar, cinnamon thins, and oatmeal cookies - I'll be trying those in the future - but I'll only bother to let you know if they're bad. I mean, once you've found satisfactory chocolate chip cookies, who cares about the rest?

Flours they use - lucy's flour blend (oat, garbanzo, potato starch, tapioca, sorghum and fava flours)

Flavor...95
Texture....85
Cost/Ease of Obtaining....60
Proximity to real thing.....85

Indexed Value: 84.44

Verdict: Unless I can find a cheaper alternative, these babies are going to be a regular mainstay of my pantry.

Things I liked to eat before I can still eat

2010-04-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Oatmeal
40 Clove Chicken
Vegetarian baked beans with nitrite free hotdogs
popcorn
steak
cheese
list under construction....

A bright side moment

2010-04-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

"Any diet that allows you to eat steak and baked potatoes is one you can survive" -- my mom.

Rant: Eating Gluten Free v. Being Gluten Free

2010-04-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

Standing in the pasta aisle, grabbing a package of the corn pasta mom and dad recommended (review to come later) a woman suggests I try a different brand. She's not GF, but her grandson is and she eats this anyway - sounds pretty good, right? A decent recommendation?

Then she tells me, "Hey, you know they're doing great things with acupuncture - maybe you can cure your celiac with that."

This is my problem. I may have to eat gluten free. But I don't want to be a gluten free person. Gluten free people are woo-woo-nauts. Want to know which you are? Thinking you can treat a food allergy with acupuncture is a good indication of being a woo-woo-naut.

Do not tell me you've been gluten free for ten years and expect that gives you credibility. What it means is that you're unlikely to remember what real food tastes like and you're probably a little bit crazy (as I expect to be by that point).

I want to hear from the people who have been gluten-free for a month and a half and like x.

Review: Wheatless in Seattle

2010-04-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.wheatlessinseattle.net/
10003 Greenwood Ave N.
Seattle, WA 98133

It's a little shack-like building on Greenwood Ave. I passed it once before I found it. There were a couple of women on laptops just hanging out.

I tried their basic sandwich bread and a brownie.

Sandwich Bread
It tasted exactly like white bread. Slightly sweet on the tongue. But the texture was surreal. Biting it turned it to little sandbits - more like poundcake than sandwich bread. Could I get used to it? Maybe. But standing up to the contents of a sandwich seems unlikely. Flours used: rice.

Flavor....70
Texture....20
Cost/Ease of Obtaining....60
Proximity to real thing...30

Indexed value: 40

Verdict: This is not the sandwich bread you're looking for.

Brownie
The crumbliness of the brownie wasn't nearly as offensive as it was in the sandwich bread. I prefer a fudgier brownie versus a cakier one and charity requires I believe they were going for cakier. The chocolate flavor was a bit lacking and it was dry - but not horrible. Truthfully I've had honest-to-god wheat flour brownies that were worse. Price: around $3

Flavor....50
Texture....40
Cost/Ease of Obtaining....60
Proximity to real thing...65

Indexed Value: 55.5

Verdict: If this was the only brownie I could ever eat, I wouldn't seek suicide. But neither would this brownie give me reason to live if I lacked another one.

The Tragic Diagnosis

2010-04-07T10:14:00.001-07:00

Part of the problem, I think is that I got the diagnosis the week I had my wisdom teeth out - it's hard to imagine how one may possibly survive when one can only eat jello - even chicken noodle soup was off the menu.

Still...

When I was diagnosed with Celiac's disease - an autoimmune disorder that causes my small intestines to respond to gluten like a Minute Man responds to a Latino migrant worker...don't you know he keeps your strawberries inexpensive? - I cried for an hour straight.

I started mentally making a list of all the things I couldn't eat:

Apple Pie
Crackers
Baguette
Chicken Noodle Soup
Cheetoes
S'mores
Sandwiches
Chicken Pot Pie
Cheeseburgers
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Spaghetti
Cupcakes

...cupcakes. I can't eat cupcakes for the rest of my natural life!

Most of my friends and family have responded the same way: it's really not that bad. You'll be ok. Well, folks, consider the following:

I already have identified a couple of things I'm allergic to - including capsaicin, the chemical that make chilies hot and is present in all peppers including bell peppers. Last time I thought, "Oh, there's not too much spicy in this" and ate carne asada, I was so sick and my stomach was so acid, I didn't just throw up, it burned my entire digestive tract on the way back up.
I'm also allergic to menthol - junior mints feel cool to you? They burn me.
Sodium nitrite - present in all cured meat (ham, bacon, salami) and most cold cuts/lunch meat. Also a natural constituent of smoke. A smoked turkey is not likely to have the item on its ingredients list, but it will have enough from the smoking process to make me ill.
Oh, and I just gave up all soda and bottled drinks because they're bad for my teeth. I love Coca Cola.

Furthermore, everyone who knows me knows I'm a picky eater. I'm what's known as a supertaster. Don't believe it exists? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster

Also: They Might Be Giants wrote a song about it

Bitter tastes stronger to me than the average person - which means leafy green vegetables are out. I'm not a big fan of soy, and I can always detect the subtle taste of mildew that's in almost all "health food" food. Soy kind of tastes like mildew. I hate curry. I've never actually tasted curry, but I hate the way it smells, so I can't even go into Indian restaurants. In fact, I don't let my husband kiss me after he's gone out and had curry. Obviously some curries are worse than others - the worse ones stick to your walls for 6 days instead of only 2.

Ok. Now, this is when things turn positive:

My father recently was diagnosed with the same thing, which is why I got tested in the first place and my parents have started to find the products they need to in order to keep him gluten-free but still well-nourished. There are a large amount of products out there designed specifically to substitute for gluten-based foods.

Most are hideously disgusting. It's like they think if you've got an allergy, you must be retarded and won't notice. Or maybe it's like the way liberal presidents always run to their right after being elected, ignoring their base - I mean, hey, where are they going to go? The Green Party? What are the crippled Celiacs going to do? Eat real bread?

::sniff:: Bread.

But! As Theodore Sturgeon famously said, 90% of everything is shit. Which, conversely, suggests that 10% of it is edible...perhaps 10% of that is even good! I'm just going to have to shift through the detritus and find the shining wheat-like gold!

My ultimate goal will be to take each of the items on the list and develop or find a decent substitute. They will be scored on the following criteria

Flavor
Texture
Cost/Ease of obtaining ingredients
Cost/Ease of making
How much is it like its real food counter part

Each will be on a scale of 1-100, with flavor and texture having a base value of one, cost/ease weighted value of one half, and being like its real food counterpart is worth a weighted 2.

I will include product names, where I got everything, and recipes with the reviews.

Remember, I am a normal person who would *never* eat this if I didn't have to, so if I say it's good, it's not the same as this chick saying it's good.

My first stop today will be the Wheatless in Seattle Bakery.