Taste test: the best gluten-free foods
This isn’t my choice. I’m not a fan of beer — an early sign of coeliac disease was beer making me stupidly sick, so I preferred cider. One of my dearest friend’s brothers is coeliac and he raves about Estrella Damm Daura. He says many heavily marketed, gluten-free beers lack body and real taste, whereas there’s a proper depth of flavour here.
Basically, it is a beer as opposed to a pretend-beer that bears little relation to the real deal.
Dylan isn’t alone in this appraisal, by the way. Estrella Damm Daura won a gold medal at the World Beer Championships, a gold medal at the International Beer Challenge, and the world’s best gluten-free lager award at the World Beer Awards.
I may be dismissive about gluten-free pasta, but when it comes to cereal, let the golden clarion bells ring. This changed my life. I was never a fan of breakfast, being more of a ‘grab a tea or coffee’ girl. Sometimes, the guilt would become too much and I’d force myself to eat gluten-free cornflakes or rice krispies. Then, I happened across Eat Natural Gluten Free Toasted Muesli. I tasted the original toasted rice first and fell head over heels. But now I’m taken with the delicious buckwheat variety. Heretofore never a fan of muesli, my first love has the most perfectly crisp ‘rice krispies’, instead of oat meal, and plump, fresh almonds, plump and juicy raisins and sultanas, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. The buckwheat comes with a smattering of cinnamon that has me smitten. Not cheap, but worth every penny.
I’ve made gluten-free pasta myself and it was a disaster. More gloupy soup than al dente, I’m afraid. I have never tasted a gluten-free pasta that approximates a good dry pasta, never mind fresh pasta (please let me know if I’m just ignorant — I’ll be delighted to sample any product that might change my opinion). And I don’t want to go to specialist shops all the time for my g-f foods. So, when sourcing pasta, I looked at the best of what’s available in the supermarket and, for me, the Tesco Free From wins hands down.
The pasta isn’t as soft as corn spaghetti, which lacks any characteristics of a basic bite. This has a bite, doesn’t stick together, and tastes benign.
While real pasta can come centre-stage in a good pasta dish, g-f pasta is a more instantly forgettable, but inoffensive, chorus girl.
Whenever I see a new, gluten-free bread, I have to try it, and, 98% of the time, it’s just more of the same.
Another gluten-free bread that tastes like all the other gluten-free breads — not a bread that you’d dream about.
The only bread that stands head and shoulders over all the others is Genius. It tastes as near as you can get to a regular, white loaf. I dream of tucking into non-coeliac doorstep sandwiches with huge wads of beef, cheese and mayo. If there was any gluten-free bread that could make itself into my dreams, this is it. It doesn’t have the thickness of a good quality, regular white, but that’s because it doesn’t have gluten. It also can feel very light — something akin to the Weight Watchers bread that my mother used to suffer.
However, it is the most pleasing gluten-free sandwich bread that I’ve ever eaten.
There are days when only chocolate can sort you out.
Nothing feels quite right, but you know that a cup of really good coffee and a slice of rich, unctuous cake will tide you over in the endorphin stakes until it is wine o’clock. If you are a coeliac, this is the cake for that coffee, so chocolatey that you may have to keep half for afterwards, and so smooth that it seems like half-chocolate, half-mousse.
When you wake up feeling like you’ve been kicked in the stomach, reach for this. You won’t be disappointed.
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