Gluten Free Help Needed!

**Juice** · 6 July 2011 at 10:42AM

My mother in law is coeliac and she was mentioning recently that the items you can get on prescription (in relation to coeliacs) have reduced significantly, is this true?

Gluten_Free_Help · 25 July 2011 at 10:06PM

Choosing Gluten free items is not always easy as although there are quite a few manufacturers providing gluten free foods. I do think the best approach is to ask for samples from different producers as we all like different types of food. Take pasta for example, if you were to go to Italy most Italians would consider any pasta that is not cooked "al dente" to be poor.Therefore for them a good gluten free pasta woul be one that is not only tasty but has a firm bite when cooked. Cookies for example to some would need to be chewy , others not so. I would strongly advise if you have the time to try to make a few of your own recipes, as in my opinion and from personal experience they are as good as if not better than the manufactured alternative.

chewynut · 26 July 2011 at 4:51PM

I've been diabetic since I was three and coeliac since I was nine and I've tried pretty much everything as gluten free stuff turned into a fad and supermarkets got competitive.

My first piece of advice is to not buy everything willy nilly because you'll soon find out how hideous most shop bought things are. I recommend that you get pasta and the Juvela white mix on prescription and buy some GF cookbooks first. You need to be prepared to experiment because nothing will taste right on first attempt. Once you get past the fact that no GF thing ever tastes quite right, everything becomes a bit more bearable so you just have to stick with it and keep trying new things until he finds what he likes most.

A recipe for simple white bread comes on the side of the Juvela white mix box and I’ve stuck to that for twelve years because there’s nothing in the shops that can match it, not even the £2.30 Genius Bread. The Genius bread is okay if you’ve got no other option but it’s so expensive for what you actually get! Homemade bread gives you about four times as much.

If you do start homebaking, I advise you to invest in some xanthan gum. It replaces the function of gluten; holding the food together. Otherwise most GF stuff will come out strangely dry and crumbly. Also, if you bake the bread in tins make sure you grease the tins thoroughly first. It sounds simple but it took us ages to work that out!

I try to avoid buying the GF biscuits and cakes because they’re loaded with sugar and salt and really not worth the expense when you can get flour on prescription and make your own stuff that will last just as long and taste so much nicer. In the fresh ‘Free From’ isle, I tend to buy the pita breads and crumpets but not much else but that’s personal taste.

One tip I can give you is to always check the use-by dates on these items because the supermarkets are lazy. The amount of times I’ve checked a packet of pita breads and at best they’re a week out of date and at worst, they’ve been green and gooey. That’s another reason why I don’t buy much GF stuff. There’s usually way too much for one person to eat before it goes off. That’d probably be okay if they were cheap but GF stuff definitely isn’t!

In the frozen ‘Free From’ isle, you can find pies, pizzas and chicken nuggets. I recommend all three, although you can get pizza bases and make your own if the frozen pizzas are too small. My dad’s pizzas are four times the size of the GF ones. If you’re looking for a sausage that’s just a nice plain sausage and not overstuffed with herbs and spices, ASDA do a fantastic packet of eight frozen plain pork sausages. It’s taken me nine years to find a sausage that’s just a sausage! I can’t remember the name, sorry, but the packet is bright green if it helps.

McDonalds is also one of the best fast food places as other places like KFC and Pizza Hut aren’t worth your time. If you take a look at the paper advert things they place in the trays, on the other side is a list of all their products and it’ll indicate which ones are GF. I think most of the burgers are and the chips are as well. I take my own bread with me and have a double cheeseburger with chips J

If you have Chinese, you’ll need to avoid soy sauce. Most Chineses we’ve used understand what we mean by GF and have been happy to just leave the soy sauce out entirely. You can buy GF soy sauce so you can always just put it on yourself when you get the meal home.

Restaurants are also open-minded when it comes to GF. Some will be great and have GF marked on the menu but most of the time it’s best to ask the waiter. I’ve never found one that’s had a problem substituting a normal cob for a GF cob for burgers that would otherwise be GF.

I hope this ramble helps somewhat