Why Gluten Free?

Gluten free. It’s something that has been popping up everywhere. First, a distant idea that only people with Celiacs disease understood and trying to navigate through a world full of hidden wheat products. Now almost anything you pick up has a bold, bright label proudly proclaiming that they are the next thing to be gluten free. But do people really understand gluten? Or is it just misunderstood? To start with, let’s define what gluten is. The dictionary simply puts it as “a mixture of plant proteins occurring in cereal grains, chiefly corn and wheat and used as an adhesive and as a flour substitute”. Now that is the drab, boring, and rather vague sense of the word. From a more technical side of it, gluten is the backbone of the baking world. It provides both structure and texture in most baked goods, from the chewiness in cookies, to the elasticity needed in bread, to leaven it to perfection.

Gluten-free is a fairly new idea, unlike gluten itself. Since the dawn of man, grains have been our savior, providing much needed food source in our struggle to survive. About two million years ago, we did not have the knowledge or technology to process grains the way we know today. Back then, it was the beginning of flatbread. Leavened bread was another 1,994,000 years away, (coming into existence when people figured out fermenting, thus alcohol and bread became friends). As time rolled on, we evolved, and bread came with us. But now people are evolving in a different direction.

It’s estimated that one in a hundred people worldwide suffer from Celiacs Disease. When you have Celiacs, your body mounts an immune reaction every time wheat is consumed, which then attacks the small intestine. For a long time people just had to deal with it, and avoid those foods that contain wheat, (easier said than done). Unfortunately, wheat is in most food items due to it being a cheap ingredient. It’s in many products you don’t realize until you really think about, like cream soups, salad dressings, processed meats, and sometimes even candy bars. The aisles of a grocery store become hard to navigate when you realize most products have had contact with wheat. But there is a silver lining, suddenly more people are aware of the food we eat and the ingredients they contain, with gluten-free, dairy-free, non-GMOs showing up on our packaging.

Since the trend has arisen, why not embrace it? But this is hard for a baker to do. We love to cling to tradition and all it’s buttery, flakey, creamy goodness. This little baker is taking on a whole new world of rice flour, tapioca starch, and xanthan gum. My mission is to bring you the hard science, the nitty, gritty parts of ditching wheat. I’m going to compare, asses, and put to the test gluten free products against the original. So please join me for the ride, as I venture through a wheat-less land.

References

https://celiac.org/

Gluten-Free Small Bites by Nicole Hunn

Fifty Food that Changed the Course of History by Bill Price

Professional Baking Sixth Edition by Wayne Gisslen