Young Gifted Coeliac

Scones and sympathy

2010-09-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

Both given to me by Imogen, and both greatly appreciated.

Drop scones - gluten-free version

Drop scones are my "I have no bread and can't be fagged to make any" solution. Dead easy, tasty and using really basic ingredients. Even the gluten-free version isn't exactly complicated. The only "trick" is the tiny amount of vinegar which seems to make the bicarb work faster and better by acidulating the milk slightly. Buttermilk (officially correct) is way too pricey in my humble opinion.

1 1/2 oz rice flour

1 1/2 oz fine maize flour

1 oz ground almonds

1 heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 dessertspoon poppy seeds (optional)

1 dessertspoon sugar

1 cup skimmed milk (may need more or less)

2 drops wine or cider vinegar

Sift the three flours and the bicarb together, then stir through the poppy seeds and sugar. Put 2 drops - literally just 2 drops - of vinegar into the milk, stir in and then immediately blend the milk into the flour mixture to make a fairly wet batter. It needs to be fractionally thicker than pancake batter, if you can remember what that looks like. Rub a smudge of vegetable oil over a clean griddle or good non-stick frying pan and put it on the hob to heat - it needs to be pretty hot for these. Test the heat of the pan with a drip or two of batter; it should cook through and go brown quickly (ideally golden brown, but they tend to be blotchy and as often as not are dark brown in one patch while still pallid in another). Put dessertspoonfuls into the pan, keeping them well apart, and spread slightly using the back of the spoon. Cook for a couple of minutes on each side, turning carefully. Keep cooked scones wrapped in a clean tea towel to prevent them going hard as they cool.

Nice with soup or sloppy stews, or served warm with butter and/or jam. This recipe is for a semi-sweet all-purpose drop scone. Add a spoonful of grated parmesan for an extra-savoury version, or put in an extra spoonful of sugar for sweeter ones. Can be cooked in big batches, cooled and frozen with greaseproof paper between individual scones. You could treat these like American breakfast pancakes, I should think, too, and serve with crispy grilled bacon and maple syrup.

Cornbread!

2010-08-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've bought a cookbook that's almost as amazing as the name of the person who wrote it: The Cornbread Gospels by Crescent Dragonwagon. It does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, giving over 200 recipes for corn bread, pancakes, tortillas and muffins.

It's not written as a gluten free cookbook but after looking through it I'd say over half of the recipes are gluten free and a fair few more could be made gluten free with a tactical substitution or two. It also has a bonus chapter on things that go well with cornbread, many of which are gluten free and all of which look delicious - I'm really looking forward to trying the tahini salad dressing, caldo verde and swoon tequila chocolate sauce.

A word of warning for Brits though, all the measurements are American - temperatures are in farenheit, cups are used instead of weights. There is a conversion table in the back but bizarrely it gives weight conversions for various dry goods but not cornmeal. I used this mug:
I'm not sure if it's the same size as an American mug but it seemed to work pretty well.

I tried out one of the recipes for the first time tonight (humouring my upset stomach doesn't seem to have worked so I decided it was time to show it who's boss),: Perfect new south-style cornbread on page 14 and it was absolutely delicious. I'm really looking forward to working through the rest of the recipes.

Here's some corn porn for you:

Genius Bread - so good it's frightening

2009-12-31T06:54:00.000-08:00

Blimey, it's been a while hasn't it? This is what I've been doing in the meantime. Anyway down to business.

I don't usually plug products on this blog, mostly because I tried it and no one sent me the free samples I'd been hoping for, but I've just discovered Genius Bread and it's amazing. It's soft, moist, as good raw as toasted and tastes exactly like I remember bread tasting. It is in fact so good that I freaked out halfway through eating my first jam sandwich, thinking that they'd accidentally put a gluten-full loaf in the gluten-free packaging, and was too scared to finish it.

I don't understand how this company can make such good bread and no one else, least of all me, can. It's probably made out of kittens or something. Or people.

Great, now the plants are out to get me too

2009-03-11T05:19:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of buckwheat flour, and was delighted to discover that instead of running the gauntlet of arnica-pushers at my local healthfood shop I could pick up the Doves Farm variety at my local waitrose (instead having to resist the temptation to buy damson and elderflower squash and bacon that costs $5 at the same time). I was a little confused however to find that it didn't say Gluten Free on the packet, so I emailled Doves Farm to check and got this response:

"There is a problem with ‘self-sown’ wheat growing in the fields of
buckwheat. It is harvested with the buckwheat and being a very similar
size and weight it will not clean out of the buckwheat when the seed passes
through the cleaning equipment. The amount of wheat contamination varies
and is usually under 200ppm, which used to be the old Codex Alimentarus limit
for gluten free products. Acceptable levels of gluten have now reduced and
we no longer claim that our buckwheat flour is gluten free.

Buckwheat seed is naturally gluten free as the packet states. I have
spoken to our Marketing Director about the wording on the packaging which does
not explain the situation clearly. She is aware of the problem and is in
the process of changing the wording on the next batch of bags to be
printed.

All the products that are gluten free (rice flour, gluten free plain white
flour, gluten free white & brown bread flours, gluten free self raising
white flour) are tested for their gluten content. Samples of the flour are
collected and samples of each production run are sent away to an outside
laboratory for gluten analysis. Hazard Analysis has been carried out on
the whole process of milling Doves Farm Gluten Free Flour and these measures
ensure that the product that is purchased by the consumer is ‘Gluten
Free’."

First of all I was very impressed with Doves farm for sending back such an informative response so quickly, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with this information. As I had been using the flour with no ill effects, presumably because the level of contamination is so low and (as anyone who's ever been on the receiving end of a tactless comment about their choice of apparel will verify) I'm not the most sensitive person out there) I'll finish the bag rather than hiding it on the Bad Shelf with all the other glutenful ingredients we've bought whilst drunk or confused and now have no idea what to do with. But should I buy more afterwards? Presumably if Doves Farm are having this problem with contamination all other manufacturers of buckwheat flour might also be getting self-sown wheat in their harvests?

Jeff tarte

2009-02-22T08:30:00.000-08:00

So called because my Mum made this for us at Christmas and my bloke's been nagging me to make it ever since. She's finally given me the recipe, which I'm posting here in the hope it'll prompt someone else to make it for him :P

180g ground almonds
4 eggs
150g caster sugar
180g unsalted butter, at room temperature
35g crystllised ginger in syrup, taken out of the syrup and roughly chopped
150g stoned prunes, or prunes that are just starting to get slighly giggly and a bit peckish
Whole almonds to go on top
3 tbsp brandy

Preheat the oven to 170
Mix ground almonds, butter and sugar, then stir in the eggs one by one.
Mix thoroughly then add the ginger and prunes.
Put into a greased ovenproof ceramic dish, scatter the almonds on top and bake for 40 mins.
Leave it to cool, poke holes in it with a fork and pour the brandy on before serving

Wrap star!

2009-02-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

After reading this post over on Gluten-free London I had to go and visit Danny's Gourmet wraps, convieniently close to both the British Library and the LSHTM. They do a variety of fillings in gluten-free corn wraps, as well as GF soups, jacket potatoes and rice dishes. I was served by Danny himself, who is wheat intolerant and so completely clued up about cross-contamination. They clean the counter for you and put on clean gloves if you say you have coeliac disease, and he also took the trouble to warn me that it wasn't a coeliac kitchen so he couldn't guarantee there might not be some flour floating around, which I appreciated but I was prepared to risk it because everyone seemed to know what they were doing - most restaurants don't bother warning you and probably have a much bigger cross-contamination problem.

I had the Camberwell wrap, which is basically bacon and egg with a bit of green stuff thrown in so you can convince yourself you're being healthy, and it was bloody lovely. I also had the dhaal soup which was very good and tasted homemade. They have some gluten free desserts too, but I was too full by that stage to investigate. Just to convince you that I'm not being paid to write this the only thing I wasn't 100% satisfied with was the tea which tasted a bit funny to me, but that's probably because it was a posh brand and a bit too fancy for the likes of me who likes hers stewed till it turns your teeth black. But I'll certainly be going back and would recommend the place to any other hungry London coeliacs.

Why I’m glad to have had coeliac disease.

2009-02-13T01:02:00.000-08:00

Coeliac disease is a pain. It’s annoying to be unable to plan a holiday without having to think about how I’m going to eat, or to have to skip dinner because the pub I’ve gone to for a night out doesn’t serve anything safe. If asked “What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?” most people would answer with a list of activities they’d always wanted to do or celebrities they’d like to get to know a little more intimately. I’d have a fish finger sandwich with brown sauce on thick slices of white bread, followed by a slice of apple pie, washed down with a pint of Belgian beer. (And ok, maybe then Jamie Foxx. But definitely in that order). But bitching aside, I do think that having coeliac disease has actually enriched my life, although I say “glad to have had” rather than “glad to have” because I’m not going to pretend for an instant that if a miracle cure existed that would allow me to pig out on takeways and order whatever I liked in a restaurant I wouldn’t take it.

For a start it’s meant that I’ve had to learn to cook - after leaving home, it was that or subsist entirely on Trufree pot rice at university (the only junk food that costs four times as much as a meal made from scratch and still tastes of hoover bag). I know I probably come across as a pretty lazy cook on this blog, with my rule that I won’t make any sort of bread requiring more than two different types of flour, but I do genuinely enjoy choosing nice ingredients and trying to do something new with them. Not being able to just reach for a ready meal if I can’t be bothered has taught me to be a lot more creative with food.

I’d like to think that all that resisting of glutenful food has taught me willpower, but I suspect that this isn’t the case; willpower certainly doesn’t seem to be very much in evidence when the prospect of writing anything for my PhD looms! Still, if you tell yourself something often enough you might eventually start to believe it.

I also think that I’ve come to appreciate food in a way I don’t think I would otherwise have done. I get hungry on train journeys or if out for the day, in a way that people who can just buy a chocolate bar from the nearest vending machine probably don’t, and I think this makes me appreciate food more when I do get it. Interestingly Spider experienced something similar when attempting a hundred mile diet, eating only food sourced from within a 100 mile radius.

This leads me on quite neatly to my interest in all things treehuggerish – I’m one of those annoying people who hoards recyclables and tuts disapprovingly at people who take weekend breaks by plane. I honestly think my concern for the environment stems from having to read food labels and starting to think about where all these strange ingredients come from, as well as having to spend a lot of time in healthfood shops in close proximity to the be-sandled and be-dreaded. And perhaps this is too much of a leap to make, but I do think I can attribute my political outlook to coeliac disease; as a sickly teenager I was acutely aware that some people found life a little bit more difficult than others did, and that this wasn’t quite fair, and next think I knew I was a rabid socialist. I still am, just a slightly quieter one.

Coeliac disease has made me more confident; I learnt pretty early on that I needed to stand up for myself, not to be too embarrassed or too polite to ask what was in something or query the answer if I was unsure. I realise that this makes me a nightmare guest, but more importantly I have also learnt that my friends will understand. For me then, the greatest benefit of coeliac disease has been to teach me the people who are worth bothering with and the people who aren’t. The person who said they wouldn’t go out with me because they didn’t want to take the chance of ending up with unhealthy children falls into the latter category. Into the former category go my Mum, who made incredible sacrifices to look after two sickly kids, the friend who always keeps a cupboard full of gluten free pasta and cakes even though I only manage to visit her twice a year, the friend who drove miles to find a gluten free treacle sponge and then stuffed me so full of gluten free home cooking that I couldn’t eat it, and my lovely bloke who goes out of his way to accommodate my diet without once making me feel that it is an issue for him. Even though he does eat my biscuits when his own are a third of the price.

In my first term at university I was very upset by the fact that the people on my corridor referred to me as “The girl who can’t eat bread”. In retrospect I was being rather oversensitive – people just getting to know each other needed some kind of handle on each other, and for plenty of others that tag was “the guy who supports Chelsea”, “the really tall bloke” or for one unfortunate “the guy who masturbates really loudly” - but it hurt that my entire personality seemed to have been distilled down in peoples’ minds to one aspect of my genetic makeup, and one I was just coming to terms with at that. But nine years on I recognise that while coeliac disease does not define my personality it has shaped some aspects of it, and on reflection those are aspects for which I am grateful.

Buckwheat brown bread

2009-02-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

*Update: There's an issue with buckwheat flour, at least from Doves farm. See this post*

Another recipe adapted from "Great Healthy F ood - Gluten Free". It has the best texture of any bread I've ever mde. I replaced the potato flour with buckwheat flour because it gives a nicer colour, and also because I once spent couple of months in a lab trying to extract enzymes from potato flour, an experience that left me heartily sick of the stuff. There is some unwritten rule that all good gluten free recipes must have one really obscure ingredient that it's impossible to source, and for this recipe it's buttermilk. I get mine from Waitrose. Helpfully it comes in a 280 ml pot and the recipe calls for 250ml, but it doesn't seem to matter if you bung the lot in.

3 medium eggs, separated
280ml buttermilk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
250g maize flour
100g buckwheat flour
1 heaped teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon dried yeast
1 teaspoon sugar

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C, gas mark 5. Grease bking tin.
Mix all the dry ingredients, the egg yolks and the buttermilk together in a big bowl.
Put on some music with a decent beat and whisk the egg whites till they form stiff peaks and your wrist aches. Or borrow your Mum's electric whisk when she's not looking.
Fold the beaten egg whites into the other ingredients.
Pour into a baking tin and bake for 45 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.

Umm, yeah, so I got a bit carried away with the pictures. This is what sliced bread looks like, in case you can't imagine this phenomenon for yourself.

Raspberry and almond cake

2009-02-01T07:13:00.000-08:00

This recipe started life as the Orange and Almond Cake from "Great Healthy Food - Gluten Free". Normally I'm a bit disappointed by gluten free cook books that only have one chapter on baking and concentrate mostly on main dishes that you could make gluten free yourself, but this one has a lot of very nice recipes for mains in and though there aren't many bread recipes they really work.

I was all ready to start baking when I read the recipe a bit more carefully and discovered that you had to boil the oranges for 2 hours before you started, and quite frankly I couldn't be arsed. I substituted two 290 ml tins of John West raspberries in juice, drained by punching a hole in either side of the lid of the tin with the can opener. I also increased the weight of almonds from 225g to 300g, as there were 300g in a packet and it seemed silly to leave 75g, and cut down on the sugar as the raspberries would be sweeter than the orange. Otherwise it's quite faithful to the recipe.

Ingredients:

2 tins raspberries in juice
6 eggs
200g white sugar
300g ground almonds (I used Natco, available from Tesco)

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
Drain the raspberries, reserving the juice.
Bung everything in a big bowl and mix it up. The raspberries will fall apart and turn everything a rather kitsch pink colour.
Grease a baking tin and pour it in.
Bake for 60-70 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
Leave to cool, then ice with kitschy pink icing made by mixing the reserved juice and icing sugar.

Pirate Parkin

2009-01-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

Because the proportions of the ingredients are pieces of eight. Geddit? Dear me. Someone put me out of my misery.

100g butter
300g Sunwheel fruit spread, flavour of your choice
200g millet flakes
200g quinoa flakes

2 large eggs
pinch cinammon
pinch ginger

Optional - dried fruit or nuts

Melt the butter and spread together
Add in the dry ingredients and eggs and mix well
Bake at 180 for 20 minutes.

Aaaaaar.

Another old chestnut

2009-01-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

Doc Wib's luscious chocolate cake

1 can chestnut puree (Merchant Gourmet. Accent on the 'e' excluded by necessity, not choice)
250g best and fairest of choc
1 tblsp (yes, 1) of dark rum
6 eggs, separated
25g light Muscovado sugar
50g caster sugar
Small amount instant coffee, dissolved in hot water (optional)

Beat puree and melted butter.
Add melted choc, caster, rum, yolks and coffee if using.
Whip whites with pinch of salt. Slowly add Musc. You want between soft and stiff peaks.
Fold whites into mix.
Line tin with greased parchment. Springforms are useful.
Bake for 45mins or until looking spendid and still with a touch of wobble (not Wibble).
Cool for 10mins in tine, then further 15-20mins on a rack ("Good God no! I'll talk....please...").

Breakfast pancakes

2009-01-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

*Update: There's an issue with buckwheat flour, at least from Doves farm. See this post*

Millet porridge certainly sticks to your ribs, and your pans, and your spoons, but sometimes it's nice to have a bit of variety for breakfast. Pancakes are great because they don't involve any weighing (too much mental effort early in the morning) - as long as you get roughly half and half milk and flour they come out ok.

Here are two versions, a more sophisticated one that goes well with scrambled eggs or posh jam and a hearty hangover version to be laden with bacon, mushrooms, gf sausages (Marks and Spencer do nice ones) and a road-accident's worth of ketchup. Enjoy.

Buckwheat pancakes

Panic not, buckwheat isn't related to wheat. Mix half a cup of buckwheat flour (Doves farm for example) with half a cup of milk and one egg. Pour a thin layer into a frying pan, a ladle is good for this. Toss over the sink. You have filthy minds people.

Hangover special

If you have a mixer capable of blitzing a small potato and small onion use it, otherwise grate the spud and finely chop the onion. Or if you're in a really bad way get someone else to do it.

Fry the vegetable bits up until they're translucent, then make batter in the same way but using maize flour instead of buckwheat flour. Add plenty of salt and pepper. Pour over the fried potato and onion and cook as before.

Chestnut quest

2009-01-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

My two best recipes require chestnut flour, which is annoying as the stuff is as difficult to come by as gold dust and about the same price. It's available from Dietary Needs Direct or Naturally Good Food but is out of stock in both places at the moment and yes you did read that right, costs £5.60 for 500g. So these aren't everyday recipes.

I did get quite excited briefly when I discovered Molino Spadoni chestnut flour at a mere £2 per 500g, but I emailed them to check if it was gf and it turns out not to be. So apparently it costs an extra £3 per 500g to put magic gluten filters around the mill or something.

I am still on the lookout for gluten free chestnut flour that doesn't break the bank, so if anyone out there knows of any let me know and I'll post you cakes. Until that day my hopeless quest continues.

Chestnut bread:

I've long ago given up trying to produce anything that tastes like bread, and instead bake things that taste nice in their own right. This produces a delicious chewy, nutty thing that I have been reliably informed tastes like the Carribean cake called "Bun" (of course I'll never get a chance to find out for myself, sob). But if you're expecting fluffy white bread I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

This freezes well if you make it into little rolls.

300g chestnut flour
300g fine corn meal (eg Natco, available from Tesco where I live at any rate)
75g rice bran
1 tablespoon xanthan gum
pinch of salt
1 pint skimmed milk
1 heaped teaspoon dried yeast (I use Doves Farm because it says gluten free)
2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon gluten free Worcester Sauce (Lea and Perrins is NOT gluten free, I use Geo Organic)

Warm the milk until it would be a comfortable temperature to put your finger in, if you were the sort of unhygenic person who would do such a thing. Add the sugar and yeast and leave to stand until it starts to fizz slightly.
Weigh out and mix together the flours, rice bran, xanthan gum and salt.
Add the milk and yeast mix, the oil and Worcester Sauce and knead it all together.
Leave it to rise for an hour.
Bung it in the oven for 45 minutes. Our oven's old and knackered so we put it on at 200 C, but it's probably meant to be 180.

Ginger cake

Group A:

200g maize meal
50g chestnut flour
2 level tsp dried ginger
1 level tsp cinammon
1 level tsp nutmeg
1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch salt

Group B:

200g black treacle
2 tbsp ginger syrup (pour it out of the jar of ginger pieces in syrup)
125g butter

Group C:

4 chunks ginger in syrup, finely chopped
a handful of chopped dates (eg Humdinger, which you can get from Tesco)
125g dark muscovado sugar

Group D

2 large eggs
250 ml milk

Preheat the oven to 180. Line a loaf tin with greased baking paper.
Combine all the dry ingredients (Group A) in a mixing bowl.
Put all of group B in a pan and heat gently until the butter melts and you get something that looks like molten tar.
Add all the group C ingredients to the pan and heat for another 5 minutes so the syrup can soak into the fruit.
Break the eggs into a bowl and stir in the milk. Add this mixture to the flour, then add the fruit and syrup. Mix well.
Bake for 35-45 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Handy print-out-and-keep guide to not poisoning me

2009-01-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

Anyone who's ever invited me to dinner then regretted it may recognise this list:

I can’t eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, barley, spelt and oats, so I can’t eat anything made from these grains. This includes:

• Bread
• Baked goods like cakes and biscuits
• Flapjack
• Pastry and crumble
• Pasta
• Couscous
• Semolina

These additives, derived from wheat, often turn up in processed foods:
• Malt or malt extract.
• Dextrose, unless it says it’s from maize or gluten free. Sometimes found in processed meat products.
• Modified starch if it does not specifically say gluten free as this is often made from wheat. This is probably the most common wheat-based additive.
• Vegetable protein or cereal protein, often used in vegetarian foods, if it doesn’t say which vegetable it comes from
• Lecithin – an emulsifier used in chocolate and ice cream – unless it specifically says soya lecithin, or the product says “gluten free” it may be from wheat
Please check the ingredients of EVERYTHING you're planning to feed me, even if you don't think there would be any wheat in it - just remember that all food manufacturers hate me and will try to smuggle gluten into the most unlikely things.

I can’t drink beer, as it comes from barley. Grain spirits like vodka and whisky have been distilled so much that there’s no protein left, so are ok for me to drink. Single malt only please :P

Things that you wouldn’t expect to find wheat in but often do:
• Most prepared sauces and mayonnaises.
• Stock cubes..
• Soya sauce nearly always has wheat in. You need to be careful too with the ones that say “wheat free”, as ten to one they have barley in instead. "Tamari" is the most likely to be gluten free, but please check.
• Cheap spice or seasoning mixes
• Ice cream
• Sausages and burgers and other prepared meat products are often bulked out with wheat called “rusk” or “cereal”
• Cold meat often contains dextrose or may have a bread crumb coating
• Seafood sticks, but just looking at them would probably tell you that they are made entirely of flour, sea bed scrapings and industrial effluent.
• Cocktails containing barley water – I know this sounds extremely unlikely but I was once given one
• Oven chips may be bulked out with flour
• Most types of mustard
• Some chocolate
• Crisps with flavourings on.

Please be careful with:
• Frying things in oil that has also had wheaty things fried in it.
• Cooking things in the same pan, or on the same grill, as things with wheat. (At the same time I mean, it’s obviously ok if it’s washed first)
• Putting spoons from dishes made with wheat into pans of things I can eat.

I know that all looks very scary and complicated, so here’s a list of things I can eat. All this is ok – don’t get confused like a friend of mine did, mistake the list of things I can eat for more things I can’t and phone up in a panic thinking she couldn’t feed me anything!

• Grains: rice, maize, millet, quinoa, amaranth.
• Starchy vegetables: potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, plantain, swede.
• All kinds of vegetables and fruit, nuts, seeds, pulses and beans. I can’t stand pine nuts or pesto though – I did consider sneaking them into the list of things I can’t eat but thought that would be a bit dishonest!
• Eggs, cheese, milk, fresh meat and fish (ie. not reconstituted and mixed with anything), as long as they are not cooked with wheat flour, batter, breadcrumbs or sauces.
• Tea and fresh coffee, but I can’t have instant coffee - not a coeliac thing but it gives me stomach ache for some reason. Always insisting on only fresh makes me sound like a total snob so I usually stick to tea.
• Any food specifically labelled as gluten free.
• Cider and wine.

Gluten free substitutes:

More and more substitutes, like rice pasta and cakes made from gluten free flour, seem to be going on sale but usually they’re not worth it – they cost a fortune and the manufacturers seem to have put all their efforts into getting the texture right and ignored the taste. I’m perfectly happy with rice instead of pasta and fruit salad instead of any fancy deserts.

Having said that, I have put up a list of nice cakey things on the left which I wouldn't object to.

There is more information about what coeliac (or celiac if you’re an afflicted American!) disease is and what food is ok here