Hello, again! Food, fashion, and fitness are still my favorite topics (and a hell of a lot less controversial than politics, publishing, and pets, which I write about elsewhere).
Let’s start with the food
In the eight years since I put this blog on hiatus, I’ve discovered I can’t digest wheat very well. This is different from being celiac, or having an allergy to gluten, but it drives me to select “gluten-free” products in the store and in restaurants. Discovery: Many of them are pretty awful.
So what I’m going to do here is list some of the non-awful wheat-free and gluten-free products I’ve discovered. Obviously, if you can’t eat wheat or gluten, you’ve likely discovered products of your own (or you have completely reorganized and restocked your kitchen so you can make time-consuming and convoluted recipes—which I admire, but have no intention of doing).
This is list is more for folks who want to cook or eat wheat-free, and want easy-to-make products they could slip past guests without anyone noticing the difference. In other words, wheat-free products that taste either great, or fairly neutral. It’s also perfect if you are entertaining guests who can’t eat wheat or gluten.
Here we go:
Pasta
After throwing out several popular brands of gluten-free pasta because the noodles were heavy and/or stuck together like glue and/or tasted ghastly, I am happy to introduce you to Le Veneziane pasta. It’s made from corn. The taste is quite neutral, it’s not gluey or gummy, and it’s perfect to use with a fairly robust tomato sauce–and quite delicious with a traditional Italian mushroom sauce. You can find it at Amazon, too.
Bread
My experiences with gluten free breads were so grim (again, buying loaves of bread, eating one slice, and…guiltily wasting the rest of the “loaf”) that I’d just about given up. Especially after going to Manhattan and dining at an acclaimed gluten-free restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. Their expensive bread was bland in flavor and utterly uninteresting in texture. I wouldn’t waste the calories on it.
So…imagine my surprise when I discovered Schar breads, most of which are made in Europe and are shelf-stable until the package is opened. When toasted, they’re perfect substitutes for wheat bread. The bagels are actually…tasty. (And this is the opinion of a Jewish woman who lived in NYC! )The white bread is fine for a ham sandwich or PB&J, and the hot dog rolls (again, toasted) are quite decent for hot dogs or sub sandwiches. My one caution about Schar breads? They will not absorb liquids. Forget trying to make French toast. Or, amuse yourself by trying and watching the slices float in the egg batter. Good news: You can find a pretty good selection of Schar breads at most Kroger grocery stores.
Cornbread and Muffins
Before trying to buy all sorts of flours and figure out my own recipes, I decided I’d try some boxed mixes by King Arthur and Red Mill. Again, both brands are available at the regular grocery store.
The King Arthur mixes (cornbread and muffin) bake up nicely. Like all the commercial gluten-free muffins I’ve had, they are heavy and sticky and very sweet. The cornbread was essentially a New England style corn muffin. But tasty. Oddly, both of these mix muffins tasted much better on the second day.
The Red Mill cornbread was the opposite of the King Arthur—a bit dry, and not sweet at all. In short, a Southern-style cornbread. It was best on the first day, and then too dry on the second day. I’d say you could definitely pass this off as a traditional cornbread.
Schar makes a chocolate muffin that is…to die for. A wonderful treat, and you could put frosting on the top to make it a cupcake. Again, something you could serve without anyone noticing it as gluten-free.
Tortillas
The first solution was, of course, to switch to corn tortillas (but watch out, some corn tortillas also have a bit of wheat flour).
When I really missed soft, floury wheat tortillas, I tried a variety of gluten-free tortillas made from a truly mind-boggling array of ingredients, including cassava and spinach. They were all pretty decent. But the one that has absolute won me over is the Ole tortilla made from chick pea flour (garbanzo flour). It’s thin, it’s light, and the taste is very neutral.
Sadly, my husband can’t digest chick pea flour. But I can easily get him the regular wheat flour tortilla when I make burritos.
Pie Crust
I think my big gluten-free success story is pie crust, made by simply substituting King Arthur 1-for-1 gluten-free flour into my favorite pie crust recipe.
The first time I whipped up the recipe, all went well until I rolled it out and got ready to flip the dough into a pie plate. It crumbled like sand, and I panicked. Luckily, I went back and consulted the King Arthur website. It instructed me to treat it like a graham cracker crust, and just press the sandy crumbs into place. When it came to the top crust, I rolled out the dough and used a large cookie cutter and a spatula, flipping six parts of a top crust into place on the pie. When baked, the crust comes out just like a traditional wheat crust. Magic!
While my training with wheat flour crusts had taught me never to over-handle a dough, it turns out you can handle this gluten-free dough all you want. You can even freeze it. I found the frozen-and-thawed dough made a slightly fluffier pie crust.
The only caution would be that the final texture of this crust is a shade gritty. This is fine with a savory pie, or a cooked fruit pie. It might not work as well with a chiffon pie.
Next time: gluten-free crackers
Fitness, Food and Fashion 