by Sally | Oct 13, 2020 | Recipes
For real bread lovers, giving up the loaf is one of the hardest changes to make when going gluten free. The smell, texture, crust, and crumb are impossible to replicate in gluten free versions, and the results can be disappointing.
So what to eat instead?
Here are 6 interesting and tasty naturally gluten free alternatives to bread…
- Sweet potato toast – simple and ever so easy to make. Slice a sweet potato lengthways into 5mm thick slices. Pop them in a toaster or under the grill, and toast until golden and slightly crispy. Top with nut butter, butter, tuna mayonnaise, mashed sardines, poached egg…
- Nori sheets bring some sushi flavours to your meal with nori wraps. Nori, like all sea vegetables, is rich in iodine, zinc, calcium, and magnesium, plus several different B-vitamins. It also contains fucans, a type of carbohydrate unique to sea vegetables that has anti-inflammatory and immune-supporting benefits.
To use the nori sheets, lay them out flat and top with shredded vegetables, meat or fish, houmous, salad leaves, and maybe some pickles or sauerkraut. Or go full on sushi and make your own sushi rolls!
- Socca – also called farinata, this is a simple flatbread made from chickpea (garbanzo) flour, oil, water, and a dash of salt. Add herbs and spices as you wish for extra flavour.
There’s recipes available here and here.
- Crackers – there’s so many to choose from now; rice ,corn, oat (make sure they are certified gluten free), buckwheat – we need never get bored with crackers again.
- Flaxseed muffins – packed with fibre, protein, essential fats, and phytoestrogens, ground flax is your hormone-balancing friend. These muffins are ideal for breakfast or a light, balanced, snack. This recipe is from There Is Life After Wheat
- Gluten free scones can be savoury or sweet, as these recipes from Jody Vassallo on the Jamie Oliver blog show. For the savoury version, if pumpkin isn’t in season try using mashed sweet potato or butternut squash instead.
Do you have a favourite gluten free alternative to bread? Let me know in the comments below or over on FB or Twitter!
by Sally | Sep 1, 2019 | Blog
It’s that time of year again…the ninth month… it’s Sourdough September!
This month-long celebration of all things sourdough is a national event run by the Real Bread Campaign with the aim of encouraging people to enjoy genuine sourdough products and support the independent bakers who produce them.
Now I’m certainly no baker. I can talk about food, write about food, and on the whole, produce tasty nutritious meals – but baking? No. No. And again no. My skills are seriously lacking. But this doesn’t stop me enjoying the occasional slice or two of a good quality sourdough bread. With butter. Natch.
True sourdough bread contains only flour, water, salt, and the starter culture that triggers the fermentation process and natural leavening. Compare this with the litany of ingredients in mass produced breads: emulsifiers, thickeners, stabilisers, improvers, bleaching agents, acidifiers, colourings – the list is looong.
Why are all these ingredients used?
Because of the Chorleywood process. Since its creation in 1961, the vast majority of bread made in the UK is done so by this process. It’s a time-saving method of producing dough with minimal fermentation time, and is needed to meet our (apparently) insatiable demand for processed bread. The process requires all these extra goodies in order to work. Plus preservatives and mould inhibitors to give the loaf a longer shelf-life.
Baking a sourdough loaf requires time and patience and brings with it an understanding of what real food – slow food – truly is. The process cannot be rushed, the end results are different every time, but the flavour and taste are worth the effort!
A potential nutritional advantage of true sourdough is the way the fermentation process reduces gluten levels. The natural bacteria in the starter culture ferment and breakdown a lot of the wheat proteins, including gluten, making them easier to digest.
Italian research from 2007 explored the gluten-degrading powers of fermentation microbes. The study results show how bread made by the sourdough fermentation process had residual gluten levels of 12ppm (parts per million). Anything below 20ppm is classed as ‘gluten-free’. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every sourdough loaf out there contains such tiny amounts of gluten, but it does illustrate the gluten reducing powers of natural sourdough fermentation.
When buying sourdough do watch out for what the Real Bread Campaign call ‘sourfraux’ – fake sourdough bread. Thanks to the rise in popularity of artisan breads like sourdough, many supermarkets and bakers are producing imitation sourdoughs that still include additives and haven’t gone through the full fermentation process. It is worth asking how the bread has been made and whether the proper starter culture has been used, so you can be confident of buying a genuine sourdough loaf.
Care to share any marvellous bread baking tips?
Do you have a sourdough starter you’d like to pass on?
Hop over to the Facebook group to tell us your breadmaking secrets…
(Photo credit: Ben Garratt on Unsplash)
by Sally | Aug 28, 2019 | Blog
Gluten is a type of protein found in the grains of wheat, barley, and rye. It’s made up of several different protein fractions, and can be difficult for some people to digest.
But why?
Haven’t we been eating wheat, barley, and rye for thousands of years? Surely we’re used to it by now.
Well, yes and no. Yes, we have been eating grains for thousands of years, but not the sorts of grains we have now. Modern varieties of wheat for example contain much higher levels of gluten due to the cross-breeding of grains and the pursuit of varieties of wheat that are shorter, easier to harvest, and more glutinous for bread making.
As a result, many people struggle to digest gluten. And for some, it can play a critical role in triggering increased intestinal permeability (aka ‘leaky gut’) and auto-immune conditions.
Find out more in this short video…
If you’d like to know more feel free to comment below or hop over to the Facebook Group at www.facebook.com/groups/nutritioninyork and join in the conversations there!
(Photo credit: Ales Krivec on Unsplash)
by Sally | Dec 3, 2012 | Blog
Via the magic world that is Twitter, I recently met the very fabulous Rebecca Richardson. Rebecca suffered with candida overgrowth for many years before finally being put on the road to recovery by her Nutritionist. A combination of detailed food planning and nutritional supplements helped her regain her health and wellbeing and she has now put together this wonderful book of recipes and food ideas for anyone suffering with candida overgrowth and gut dysbiosis.
All the recipes are free from sugar, gluten, dairy, alcohol, wheat and fruit – many can also be adapted to be vegetarian too.
To give you a taster of what Rebecca has to offer, I have put 3 recipes in the Recipe section of this site; enjoy cooking!
For more details on Rebecca and how to order her book click here