Norfolk Street Bakery Cambridge Gluten Free Bread!

I can barely contain my excitement from eating this bread - it truly is superb!

The Norfolk Street bakery is situated towards the east of Cambridge city centre, in a quiet terraced road scattered with little shops and cafes such as this. I have walked past it many times assuming I wouldn't be able to eat anything at it - but how wrong was I!

I bought a GF loaf for £3.10 (I think) which is fairly standard for GF fare, and no more expensive than the average loaf you get from a supermarket. I left happily cuddling my loaf and excited to cut into it and give it ago.

This is what it looked like- bread! It was soft but with a decent crust on it as well. The texture was light and fluffy and the taste was very good. It tasted like bread - slightly sweet with a very slightly bitter aftertaste. But still very very tasty. I was over the moon - a loaf of bread that actually tastes like bread, that is enjoyable to eat and not a chore! So often bread is just a means to an end - something I can toast and spread something on so I don't go to work without breakfast or something to hold the sandwich filling in (often very half-heartedly!). This is a loaf of bread that I can actually imagine sitting in the garden with a glass of wine and dipping in some olive oil and just eating as a nibble - because it tastes good and is pleasant to eat! I could definitely tell it was fresh as well - I was assured that it was made in the early hours of that morning!

Another slice in and I discovered a bit of a hole near the top - goes through quite a long way but not too big. I think this might be to do with proving for too long. It's not a big problem though. It looks like the loaf was baked in quite a small (width and height) but long tin and has mushroomed over the top. I quite like that though - makes it look rustic.

Anyone who lives anywhere near Cambridge and requires gluten free bread HAS to go hear ASAP! I can't believe this place is only a six minute walk from my front door!

P.S. Sorry the photos aren't great - only have my pc webcam to take photos at the moment.

Adapting to the gluten free lifestyle

This post is designed to lead on from 'Diagnosis of coeliac disease' so you should read that first.

Having received the results of my Coeliac test, the news slowly began to sink in. I gave up gluten more or less straight away, before I went to the follow up appointment or saw the dietician. At first I didn’t take it all that seriously, which was a bit of a mistake. I used the same toaster for my gluten free bread as for normal bread, and shared jars of spread with gluten crumbs. I did check ingredients lists for gluten but sometimes I bent the rules somewhat. For example, I was on a journey somewhere and I wanted one of those little packs of sushi for lunch, it said it had wheat in it from the soy sauce. I bought it anyway and just didn’t use the soy sauce, when really the sushi itself could have had soy sauce in it.

Dirty gluten crumbs

The hardest thing to give up were bread and beer. Bread was difficult because my mum was just starting to get good at baking and I couldn’t eat her bread anymore. We went on a gluten free artisan baking course to try and learn how to make nice gluten free bread. However, the course seemed to be more focused on avoiding additives and using natural ingredients than producing decent bread. If you remove gluten from bread, which normally relies on this for structure, texture and is essentially what makes bread bread, you’ve got to replace it with something. Usually this is xanthan gum, guar gum, chia seeds or egg. Some of the bread we made tasted quite nice, but they didn’t really hang together.

Giving up beer was hard because I was an ale drinker. I used to drink cider but I would often end up coughing with an itchy throat and being sick, I realised this was because I was allergic to apples and so I was left with alcoholic ginger beer as my thirst quenching beer-like drink. However, I don’t think alcoholic ginger beer is a session drink. For a long time I mainly drank wine in pubs, or wine spritzers in the summer. In summer 2014, I decided that my quality of life would increase a lot of I were able to drink cider. I take anti histamines everyday anyway, so I thought it wouldn’t be too bad, and it wasn’t. It did make my mouth a bit itchy at first, and I started off by just drinking half pints, and trying out perrys first, because I’ve always been less affected by pears than apples. Now I can drink cider with no problems at all.

I think having started being a bit slack made it more difficult to adjust to being gluten free. I visited the dietician who emphasised how important it is to be properly 100% gluten free if I want my insides to get better, even when I’m not having symptoms.

Now I have my own toaster, which I’ve written on with a sharpie:

I’ve also used toastabags when I’ve been on holiday, but at home it’s easiest just to have my own toaster since they’re only £5 from a supermarket. I also have put ‘GF’ labels on my jars of things that might end up being contaminated:

My lovely flatmate at uni was so understanding that he even put this label on one of his jars when we both had the same pesto:

I always clean up crumbs before I cook now. I do feel better than I did when I was eating gluten- the main thing is that I get ill a lot less often and when I do get ill I get better a lot quicker. My advice to newly diagnosed coeliacs would be to take the gluten free diet seriously from the offset. Try to learn how to explain the disease and answer questions that you will inevitably get:

So what is coeliac disease, is it an allergy or something? It’s not an allergy or intolerance, but an autoimmune disease where the presence of gluten in the diet triggers the immune system to attack healthy tissues in the body. This causes damage to the digestive system, which can cause diarrhoea and vomiting.

If you eat this (holds up piece of bread, for example), will you have to go to a and e? No, but I will feel pretty ill for the next couple of days and it will effect me for several months.

If it’s not that serious, why don’t you just try a sip of my beer? Or a corner of this biscuit? Because even a little bit will still make me ill!

Oh my (friend/aunt/brother) is gluten free, but they know their threshold so they can eat like one sandwich a week or a pint every other day or something… Some people with intolerances are able to tolerate a certain amount of gluten without any ill effects, it’s different for Coeliacs, even a small amount of gluten will damage my insides.

Good luck!

Gluten Free Baking- Double-baked Cheese Soufflé

Souffle is not something I’ve eaten much of, even before diagnosis, but something that I’ve always found quite intriguing. The mousse like texture of soufflé is appealing and I thought I’d give it a try. I made the double-baked cheese soufflé from the Hamlyn all colour cookbook ‘200 gluten-free recipes’. These are the ingredients I used:

The recipe involved making a rice flour based cheese sauce, into which whisked egg whites are folded. The cheese I used was a Cheshire blue and the mixture also contained chives, thyme and mustard. This was then baked for 15 minutes at 180C, here they are in the oven:

After the first bake they had gone golden, but not risen very much. They looked like this:

The soufflé then had to be left to cool completely before the second bake. Before baking again, a mixture of double cream and grated Parmesan was poured on top. Here they are just before the second baking:

This time they were cooked for 10 minutes at 220C. This is what they looked like when they came out:

They have risen a little but unfortunately soon sunk. The soufflé had a really great flavour, very cheesy and creamy complemented well by the herby flavour of the chives and the subtle hint of mustard. The texture was very pleasing; the lower layer was a dense mousse, thick and creamy. The upper layer was quite wet and cream like still, it probably needed a little longer which would have allowed it to stay up after it had risen. The Parmesan in the upper layer had melted to a stringy consistency, which made eating it even more interesting. Here is a picture of the texture inside:

You can see the mousse like texture lower down with the wet cream above and Parmesan skin on top. The soufflé was very good and surprisingly easy to make, definitely something I’d try again, maybe a sweet one next time.

Gluten Free Baking- Simple Focaccia

Recipes reproduced with permission of sasquatch books

Focaccia has always been one of my favourite breads. I really like the comforting oiliness of it, the peppery olive flavour and the loose texture with large air spaces. It is also a bread that my Mum is particularly good at making, seeing her produce dozens of them each month fills me with jealously! Since diagnosis I am yet to have gluten free Focaccia that tastes or looks like focaccia. The unique structure and flavour of focaccia seems to rely on the presence of the forbidden gluten. 

Here is a simplified version of the recipe:

Ingredients:

2 tbsp chia seeds

½ cup water

1 cup teff flour

1 cup tapioca flour

½ cup arrowroot

½ cup sorghum flour

¼ cup garbanzo bean flour

¼ cup millet flour

¼ cup flax meal

2 tablespoons herbes de provence

1 teaspoon salt

1 envelope(2 ¾ tsp) active dry yeast

1 cup room temp water

5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 tbsp maple syrup

1 large onion, halved and sliced

Here is a picture of the ingredients:

1. Soak chia seeds in half cup of water for 15 mins. Heat oven to 425F (218C). Line baking sheet.

2.  Mix dry ingredients excluding yeast in bowl

3.  In a separate bowl, mix yeast, water, 3tbsp oil and maple syrup. Wait for mixture to foam.

4.  Add dry ingredients and chia seeds into wet ingredients.

5. Mix with a  sturdy spoons and by hand until a dough is formed.

6. Turn out onto the baking sheets and shape into a large oval, press small dimples into the dough.

This is the completed dough before cooking:

7. Bake in oven for 25mins.

8. Sauté onions for 8 mins in the remaining olive oil until transparent and beginning to brown.

9.  Remove focaccia, cover with onions return and bake for an additional 25 mins.

This is the focaccia just after cooking:

The onions have gone a little black, even though it was only in for around 10 of the final 25 minutes. To my disappointment the focaccia hadn’t risen at all. The look of the bread was quite good, brown and a nice shape and the smell of the onions and herbs in the dough was really appetising. This is a slice of it cut open:

The dough was very dense because it hadn’t risen very much at all. The crust was thick and difficult to bite or cut through which made eating it a bit of a chore. The flavour was probably the best thing about the bread. It tasted herby and comforting but this was let down by the difficulty in eating it. I would also have preferred it to have the familiar greasy, oily texture but this was very dry and chewy in texture. In the end I ended up throwing quite a lot of it away. It was just too difficult to eat and got more so as it got older. I’m still on the look out for a decent gluten free focaccia!

Bruschetta Gluten Free, Kingston

Last weekend I was in London visiting my brother and on Sunday we made a pilgrimage to Bruschetta, Kingston. Bruschetta is the kind of restaurant coeliacs dream of. Everything on the menu is available gluten free, including fresh handmade pasta. Here I am outside the restaurant looking excited:

Any restaurant with the crossed grain symbol on the outside is a definite good start!

 Taking a look at the drinks menu I noticed it said 'gluten free beer'. I asked which beer it was and was given a choice, yes a choice! They had Celia gluten free lager or Estrella Damm Daura. I hadn't tried the Celia lager before so went for this. It was very nice, refreshing and tasty.

 To start with we had a bruschetta classica and a  9 inch foccace Biancaneve. The bruschetta was toasted with tomato, garlic and basil on top. It was very tasty as was the salad it came with.

The bread was not made on the premises but imported from Italy. All their Pizza bases and some of there pastas were made fresh on site. The  9 inch foccace Biancaneve was essentially a garlic pizza bread with mozzarella: 

It was very nice, the pizza was quite thin and crisp around the edges but could've done with a bit longer to make it crispy all the way through.

As a main course I had the fresh gluten free ravioli of the day, which was stuffed with spinach and ricotta and ricotta and served with a cherry tomato sauce. 

The pasta was very nice, probably the best I've ever had since I've been gluten free. You could tell it was freshly made and it had a great taste and texture. 

My brother had a gluten free margarita pizza:

It was very good, the base was cooked better and was properly crispy. The toppings were nice, it was definitely up there with the best I'd had in Glasgow. At this point I was stuffed, I couldn't even finish all my ravioli. I asked for the dessert menu just to see what they had, here it is:

I was very excited to see gluten free tiramisu on the menu, it had been my all time favourite dessert. I'd never seen a gluten free tiramisu on a menu before and only made it once because it's quite time consuming. I asked if it was possible to have tiramisu to go, but it wasn't as they were already set in a glass bowl. Instead I had the caprese cake, a chocolate and hazelnut cake. Here it is later at home:

It was very tasty, moist and chocolatey. I'd recommend Bruschetta to anyone living near, or visiting London. It really was a trip worth making. The also sell gluten free produce in the shop. I bought some tagliatelle, as I've not seen this before and I haven't tried it yet. The coeliacs of Kingston and London are lucky to have this haven right on their doorsteps!

Gluten Free Pizza Glasgow

Being diagnosed with coeliac disease at the age of nineteen inspired me to search for innovative solutions to ensure that there were no foods I could not eat. Prior to diagnosis I had been an occasional pizza eater, eating for convenience at home and indulging in a take out once in a while. But now restaurants were starting to offer gluten free pizzas I felt duty bound to test them all! There seem to be a few classes of gluten free pizza bases on offer, there are those available from the NHS-hard, long-life, slightly sweet and almost too tough to bite through. I’ve not had a lot of luck with these, finding them either to be undercooked or burnt, or even both at once! The shape and weight of these pizza bases allows them to act as excellent Frisbees in the summer months! It may be that an alternative brand of pizza base available on prescription is much more palatable, but I am yet to experience this. Other pizza bases can be eggy, egg being used in higher quantities than normal as a binding agent to make up for the lack of gluten. Some pizza bases can be bready, and others can be very, well, pizza like!

            I spend most of my time in Glasgow, being a student there so this article will focus on pizzas I’ve experienced in Glasgow, as well as some from chain restaurants available nationwide. The first restaurant gluten free pizza I tried was from Firebird, Argyll Street, Glasgow. I was very impressed; the base was thin, crisp, tasty and not at all soggy. I honestly couldn’t tell the base apart from the gluten containing bases I had previously eaten. My boyfriend confirmed that the base was just as tasty as his gluteny one. The toppings were interesting, tasty and the price was good. Firebird also serves Estrella Damm Daura gluten free lager. Having previously been an enthusiastic ale drinker, I find this lager to be tolerable, refreshing and a great accompaniment to the pizza. My first gluten free pizza out was off to a great start!

            Sticking with the theme of independent (not large chain) restaurants I will review Sarti. Sarti is a small independent chain of restaurants located around Glasgow city centre. They offer gluten free pizza and pasta. In support of my diet, my boyfriend had the gluten free pasta so I had the chance to try this as well. The trouble I have often found with gluten free pasta in restaurants is that it needs careful attention whilst it is cooked. The difference between perfect Al Dente pasta and soggy mush can be less than a minute. Unfortunately, the pasta dish at Sarti was soggy. I had the same experience at Zizzi, the Italian chain restaurant. I intend to adopt a new policy of requesting it to be cooked Al Dente when ordering and then sending it back if it is not! However, the pizza at Sarti was very good, quite crispy and very tasty! The pizza was very hard to cut. A common theme of gluten free pizzas is the difficulty in cutting them. They tend to arrive uncut as the restaurants use common utensils to slice all their pizzas so these are contaminated with gluten. It’s best to ask waiter for a pizza slicer to avoid sawing at it for ages!

            Little Italy on byres road is a convenient place for pizza to eat in or takeaway. The first time I went I had a take away pizza; the base was very thin and tasted quite eggy. Although the bottom of the pizza was crispy further up the base was quite soggy. The egginess meant the base was quite chewy, but the toppings were nice and the pizza was probably the cheapest of those I’ve tried. When I tried is again to eat in it was an entirely different, and more positive experience. The base had been sliced, which helped immensely. This time it wasn’t soggy at all and tasted great. Maybe being in the box for the walk home had made the pizza soggy.

            The chain restaurants where I have tried the gluten free pizzas are Pizza Hut, Dominos and Pizza Express, which only started offering gluten free options recently. Personally, my favourite chain bases are Dominos, followed by Pizza Express then Pizza Hut. I tried Dominos for the first time the day they introduced the gluten free base and they were obviously experiencing some teething problems. The base was undercooked, and not at all crispy whilst the toppings were overcooked. Coupled with the fact that we were refused access to the “twofortuesday” deal as the deal is only available on medium and large bases whilst the gluten free base is only offered in small, and that the price was high I was not a happy customer! The second time I tried it was much better. The base was crisp and pizza like and the toppings cooked perfectly. The size might be a bit annoying for those with a larger appetite but was just right for me. Dominos has now included the gluten free base in the  “twofortuesday” deal, providing the other pizza is a medium/ large on a gluteness base, a little annoying if you're a gluten free family but still something.

            Pizza Express gluten free pizzas were really good. Unlike Dominos, who clearly mark on the menu which toppings contain gluten, and Pizza Hut, who changed all toppings to be gluten free on the introduction of their gluten free bases, Pizza Express lacked the clear guidance on the menu as to which toppings are suitable. The knowledge of the waiter and/or the chef was relied upon. However, both pizzas I have had were no problem and tasted delicious. The base was quite thin and crispy, and the little holes reminded me of matzo cracker bread. One thing that’s unique about Pizza Express as a chain restaurant is that it has gluten free beer on offer. Greens Pilsner was enjoyable to drink but at £4.45 for just 33cl I think I’ll stick to wine in future! Here is a picture of a gluten free Pizza Express Pizza from the Manchester restaurant: 

            Finally, Pizza Hut provides a square gluten free base. Being a coeliac it’s always worrying when you order a gluten free version of something and when it arrives it looks identical to a gluten-containing version that a friend ordered. The square base is reassuringly different to the gluten containing round ones. The pizza was quite bread-like and tasty.

            Overall, if I had to rank the experiences I’ve had based primarily on my enjoyment of the pizza, but also taking into account value for money, service and atmosphere, I would order them as:

1. Firebird, Argyll Street, Glasgow

2.  Sarti, Glasgow city centre

3. Dominos, Nationwide

4. Pizza Express, Nationwide

5.  Little Italy, Byres Road, Glasgow

6.  Pizza Hut, Nationwide

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That being said I would go back to all of these restaurants for pizza in the future. Thank you for reading my first ever blog post. I hope you have found some of the information here useful.

Ellie