The Gluten Free Kitchen

While often accompanied by feelings of relief, being diagnosed with celiac disease can be crushing. Confusion around diet and lifestyle changes are hard during the best of times, and become much harder when you're feeling ill. When my wife was diagnosed several years ago, we were obviously concerned with helping her to get healthy, but nearly of equal concern was our desire to preserve our established lifestyle. While things have changed for us, living gluten free isn't nearly the sacrifice we'd envisioned. This article is concerned with staying gluten free at home. Subsequent articles will deal with eating out, family support, and what to do if your children have celiac disease. We hope this article will help to ease your transition to gluten free living.

My wife was always a big cooker. The kitchen is a place of relaxation for her, and she delights in experimenting with new foods, as well as exploring new culinary themes. While her love of cooking in made some aspects of our transition easier than it would be if we had existed entirely on convenience foods, it also presented some big challenges - many of our favorite dishes required serious re-thinking before we could ever enjoy them again. Every household and culture has favorite foods, and the internet abounds with excellent recipe options. For that reason, this article will not provide specific recipes, but rather focus on lifestyle considerations. When cooking in, keep the following in mind:

Baking: Baking will never be the same again. I lead with this because it has been my wife's biggest complaint, post-adjustment. It is possible to make some very tasty gluten-free breads at home, but gluten-free bread doughs resemble cake batter more than traditional doughs, and the traditional and grounding act of kneading is pretty much a thing of the past, replaced by an electric mixer. We find breads to be much tastier when fresh. Gluten free breads store better for us wrapped in aluminum foil than in plastic, too. For sandwiches to be packed for lunch away from home, we recommend purchasing bread - none of the home-made breads we've made, though flavorful, pack well. Our favorites are the rolls made by Against the Grain Gourmet in Vermont. They're great toasted or not, though if you toast them, give them an extra go-round in the toaster for a real crispy roll.

Cakes, pies, and pastries lend themselves very well to cooking at home, and there are more recipes out there than you could shake a stick at. Our luck has been best with flour mixes provided in recipes, rather than ready-made pie, cake, and pastry flour mixes.

Cross-contamination: Learn to read ingredients. The first time you accidentally include a gluten-containing ingredient in your culinary creation, you'll learn this lesson. After a week of feeling pretty good, my poor wife had an awful intestinal experience when I accidentally used a fish sauce that contained barley as a sweetener. We subsequently cleared the pantry of all gluten-containing ingredients. If you decide not to maintain a gluten-free kitchen (as is reasonable if not all household members are sensitive to gluten), take care when using things like peanut butter, jelly, butter, cream cheese, and the like. Double-dipping a knife that has contacted toast introduces crumbs to the spread, which can then be transferred. We keep two butter-dishes in the fridge for this reason.

Utensils: When my wife was diagnosed, we threw out EVERYTHING. We got rid of cutting boards, wooden spoons, small appliances, the works - this was a bit of an over-reaction. While she is extremely sensitive to cross-contamination, maintaining clean appliances and utensils seems to do the trick just fine. We do keep two toasters in the house, one for gluten-containing breads and one for gluten-free.