Trying to cook and create meals that are gluten –free are challenging from the outset. There is no ‘easing into the routine of living without gluten’ for those that suffer from an allergy to it. If your health is to remain optimum and your day to day means not having an adverse immune reaction to something that you’ve eaten, then a gluten-free diet and alteration to the foods that you have on hand within your home have to be instantly changed. Let us start with your home and what we would expect to find in the pantry of a person living with gluten intolerance.

Rather than rummaging through an endless array of ingredients and products to find the materials needed for gluten-free meals, keep a pantry that will have the following ingredients that in the long run will reduce the labour. Your pantry will contain the following recommended items:

• Gluten-free starches: items like potato starch, corn starch, and tapioca starch are excellent as additives to sauses, fruit pies and Asian meals.

• Acids: lemon juice or vinegar which are good in helping the baked goods to rise.

• Gluten-free flours: flours are used, as you know, in baking or in making your gravies thicker. Substitutes such as soy flours, sorghum, brown rice, bean, quiona, or amaranth are suggested alternatives to the standard gluten flours available.

• Stablizers: this ingredient can be found either via the internet or within health foods stores and are used in making dough or batter stronger.

The absence of gluten in your baking products can pose a challenge as it gives the dough texture and strength for stretching and rising. The same texture and performance in the rising dough without gluten shouldn’t be anticipated, unfortunately. Therefore the ingredient list for a gluten-free dough is a little longer as additional ingredients are needed to make up the difference. There is a large collection of cookbooks available that can give some badly needed direction and excellent meals in lieu of the meals with gluten. Don’t be discouraged!

The satisfaction in mastering your condition results in overcoming the feelings of being overwhelmed in eliminating products that are so widely used in your diet. Knowing what to use, using them each and every day and for every meal eventually translates to a second nature. You’ll be at pains to remember what it was like cooking with the regular ingredients that you now have to avoid permanently. Because regular, gluten foods and ingredients are more dominant in the markets and diets of many people the world over, it naturally follows that the difficulty in finding the alternatives is just as large, however thanks to the internet, health food stores, gluten-free cookbooks, dieticians, immunologists/allergists, and gluten-free products available, that is largely a thing of the past for those that suffer from gluten intolerance.

Related articles

• Gluten free foods (food-allergydata.com)
• What is gluten (food-allergydata.com)