Wednesday 14 August 2013

Press my apples

The Great British Beer Festival presents visitors with over 800 casked and bottled beers and ciders under the shelter of the majestically Victorian Olympia venue in Kensington. The festival caters to the gluten-free niche with a respectably sized and well-staffed cider area not to mention the numerous food stands with Coeliac friendly signage.

While I was perfectly content with my selection of ciders and perries and my dinner of curried lamb (samosa seemed lovely by proxy), I did enjoy smelling various ales and stouts and my lips just lingered over a friend's pint of Bartram's Egalitarian Anti-Imperialist Soviet Stout, which smelled of peppered chocolate and communism. If tonight reinforced one thing though, it's that a gluten free life isn't so horrible, especially whilst in good company who take it well when you deploy every euphamism imaginable as they're eating longer than average hotdogs. And that the Brits really do make great cider.

Favourite cider of the night, Ross-on-Wye from Herefordshire.

Tip: cheaper advance tickets are available online up to 24 hours before your entry day of choice.

Monday 12 August 2013

Things fall apart

With the savoury side of life mostly covered with suitable pasta, meat and dressing alternatives, bread is where it all starts to fall apart. Literally.


Pink Champagne Gluten-free cupcakes

The Great British Bakeoff is my favourite reality program in the UK, it’s so charming, quaint, fun and presents the aspiring bakers with wonderful challenges. Paul Hollywood (not to be confused with the Paul I usually refer to), while a tad arrogant, is a fantastic baker and celebrity chef who acts as a judge on the program. His specialty is bread-making and while I absolutely adore watching him bake and talk about the baking process, it is agonising to hear him mention gluten so damn much.

 XANTHAN GUM is an ingredient present in a lot of gluten-free products because it acts as a thickening and binding agent in an environment where the gluten from the wheat-flour would normally provide elasticity. Some gluten-free self raising flours have xantham gum mixed in while other plain varities often do not but the xantham gum is readily available in baking sections of large grocery stores.

I've attempted a few lots of cupcakes using gluten-free flour. The key-lime pie ones were a definite success, the pink champagne ones fizzled out, but Paul has even mastered a recipe for gluten-free pancakes.

I don't have much of a sweet tooth so I can't testify for too many store-bought gluten-free cakes and pastries. Any store-bought bread has been wholly unriveting. As a personal preference that fast approaches a general rule, gluten-free breads need to be toasted to be even remotely passable. Whether it's something about the preservatives used that make them unappetizing when cold, I'm not sure. 

SAINSBURY'S GARLIC & HERB PITAS taste great and work well as dippers but even after heating are difficult to open into a pocket.

GLUTINO bagels (acquired in Canada) have a nicer texture than most breads I've tried, with a density approaching that of a proper bagel but definitely need to be toasted as per instructions on pack. Seeing as how I had high bagel standards to begin with, anything called a bagel that is not a freshly based Montreal bagel was going to have to bring its top guns. Proper Montreal bagels are the one food I found most difficult to resist during a trip back home.

DIETARY SPECIALS do rolls that are the best I've tried for sandwiches and they double up well as hamburger buns. I prefer much of their line over most grocery stores' own 'Free From' ranges. While the DS buns are passable cold for sandwiches, I do toast them to ensure they don't disintegrate when in contact with anything hot 'n juicy. I've always been a fan of toasted buns so at the very least this element of this gluten-free adventure isn't a horrendous life-changing endeavour.

Thursday 8 August 2013

Get back in here and make me a sandwich.



Seen at my local station the week I moved to London. Little did I know, about a year later, that sandwiches would never be the same (though the thought is ever as appealing despite the the unfortunate circumstances at work in the summer of 2012 when we were fed boxed slice bread sandwiches for 2 months). I digress.

Friday 2 August 2013

Step 2: Wherein I restock my cupboards

Everything will always be alright (when we go shopping)

My first few forays to the grocery store after finding out about the Coeliac disease took twice as long as usual. I assumed, correctly, that I would become one of those shoppers who reads the ingredients list on everything but I can’t discourage this habit. It did take me a few months before I was seriously vigilant, almost aggressively so with myself, but I realized the only way I would find out how much I can tolerate is to cut out the gluten altogether. That way, if I were to accidentally slip up, I could more easily trace the culprit.

The obvious things like bread, pasta, beer, I cut out almost immediately. Substitutes are certainly readily available and I have since found some gluten-free favourites, as well as some blasphemous attempts at alternatives. There are so many things that I initially took for granted, never thinking for a moment that they could contain gluten. An alarming proportion of food, both fresh and non-perishable, use wheat flour as seasoning, binding agents, or preservatives.

Like soy sauce.

We were in the habit of regularly making stir-fry and sauces with soy sauce at home, not to mention eating Chinese take-away or sushi on the run at least once a week, and it was at least 6 months before I stopped to read the label on our soy sauce bottle. Bam. Wheat preservatives. I was so unbelievably angry with myself for overlooking that one and I was, once again, angry at the injustice of being deprived of even more of my favourite foods.

TAMARI SOY SAUCE, I was to discover, is a gluten-free alternative to your regular run-of-the-mill soy sauce. With no wheat, it simply has higher concentrations of soy beans, though the brand I use doesn’t taste quite as strong or salty but is still a perfectly acceptable substitute. They say the recipe for Tamari soy sauce is actually closest to the original Chinese soy sauce recipe introduced in Japan. While eating out is still something to be wary about, at least I could be certain I was safe at home.

I’m convinced adding breadcrumbs to hamburgers and sausages is just a way for the manufacturers to save money as opposed to doing anything structurally beneficial to the meat. With the exception of Tesco Finest Pork and Chive sausages, the labels on every one of their other packaged sausages flag up the presence of gluten/wheat. Whether the Chive ones were actually made without breadcrumbs, I’m not sure but one day when they were out of stock and I was having a little sulk in the chilled meat section, I took a few steps further down the aisle and my most favourite discovery yet showed its pretty little face (in part because its packaging decidedly stands out).

Enter HECK SAUSAGES. Farmer’s quality sausages from a UK-family run business, with a lovely ‘Gluten Free’ proclamation on their cheerily bold and colourful packing. The good part? When on sale, these babies cost the same as Tesco Finest sausages; a rare occurrence in which a gluten-free option doesn’t cost more than a glutened alternative. The best part? They taste infinitely better than any pre-packaged grocery-store sausages I’ve ever had. Paul agrees. They are heavenly plump with hardly any grease and/or fat oozing out during the cooking process, come in a variety of flavours, and the company operates by ethical and fair production standards. Heck sausages are the one gluten-free food I’ve tried that I happily recommend to even non-Coeliacs.

So life is feeling a bit more normal. I have soy sauce, I have sausages. Anything fresh in the way of fruits and vegetables are obviously fine. The next step was finding a great substitute for pasta and bread. I’m still waiting on the latter. Pasta, sigh, will never hold the same appeal to me. I’ve tried pasta made with rice flour and corn flour. I can say most of the corn flour options I’ve tried tend to fall apart during the boiling process. I like my pasta al dente but no gluten means that elasticity is greatly reduced, making it is slightly more difficult to assemble things like cannelloni or lasagna, and a lot of things effectively wind up having the texture of cardboard. That being said, some of products made with rice and/or potato flour turn out just fine and if enough love is put into the seasoning, I’m a happy camper.