How my gluten-free life started
I was diagnosed with coeliac disease when I was about 13 years old, living in a small town in Sicily, in Southern Italy. “You can’t eat pizza anymore”, “you can’t eat pasta anymore”, “you can’t eat bread anymore”, were the easiest way to explain to a kid what is happening to him and why he had to do a gastroscopy. These were also the sentences that probably gave me one of the toughest heartbreaks. It was also completely out of the blue too, as I was asymptomatic, and the disease was found out almost by chance.
Soon I learned that life would not be that difficult and there was a fast-growing market for gluten-free food. During the first years, gluten-free processed food was not that good, and restaurants were not as aware of food allergies as they are today. It was a bit of a nightmare to eat outside, but when at home my mom (who does not cook) was doing the best she could to bake me a pizza or a cake. I remember being grateful for that when I was a child, but it is growing up that I realised the size of the efforts she made and what a wonderful expression of love that was.
However, I do remember vividly the way she was struggling with extremely sticky pizza doughs and bread made with commercial gluten-free flour blends. Pizza was good, while bread never come out decent. This has put me off from approaching gluten-free bread baking, even as I become obsessed about cooking. Until I finally did start… and got obsessed with it… and got time to read a lot on dough fermentation and experiment relentlessly with all the new ingredients available to us. For part of the time I got, I need to thank the working-from-home solutions once the coronavirus hit at the beginning of 2020.
Good news for you: you can make exceptional and healthy gluten-free bread at home
The result is that, although I keep experimenting continuously to improve more and more, I now bake gluten-free bread regularly and consistently. I get good results, for breads that have little to envy to wheat-based breads. While so far I have always organised dinner parties where basically all recipes involved no bread, after the recent successes I have now no fear in bringing a few loaves of gluten-free bread as my contribution to a dinner party. I have no fear of organising dinner parties where the star of the night is my gluten-free pizza!
And there is more to it! I do a lot of research on ingredients and I am very conscious about the nutritional value and glycaemic index of my breads. Gluten-free commercial products have become better and better over the years, in taste and texture. However, they do use high amounts of pure starches, which have very high impact on our sugar levels and are void of vitamins, proteins, and anything else you will find in grain flours (white rice flour, brown rice flour, sorghum flour, gluten-free oat flour, etc.) or extremely nutritious pseudo-grain flours (buckwheat flour, teff flour, tigernut flour, etc). Next time you do the groceries, do the following experiment: pick up a few gluten-free bread products and read the ingredients. In most countries (certainly in UK and European countries), ingredients are listed by descending order of quantity. I was shocked to find breads that contain no flour at all! Only starches, binders, preservatives. These breads can be decent in taste and texture, I am not trying to boycott them. What I am trying to say is that today you can make better and healthier bread at home! It can be yeasted bread or sourdough bread! It can be pizza! It can be focaccia!
You will have to do a very small fraction of the work, as I am here to share the results of my experiments with you. Keep following me! New recipes are already in the pipeline.
Check my gluten-free bread and pizza recipes!
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