It has been nearly five weeks since I started eating gluten free and one thing I have observed is that it is a lot more expensive than eating my normal diet. I've mentioned in previous posts that eating GF in restaurants is more costly than eating “normal” food. I've discovered that it is a lot easier and less expensive to eat GF at home, but it is more expensive than eating non-GF food at home. I've also found that a lot of the GF food items are not real tasty. So today I'm going to review some of the store-bought GF items I've tried and give my impression of them.
The good news is that a lot of the things that I normally eat are gluten free. My wife and I eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and they are all gluten free. So if you're a fruit and veggie fan and you do your own cooking, you can eat GF pretty inexpensively if you use fresh produce and avoid processed foods. Some processed foods are inherently gluten free too. That includes some of the things that I normally eat, such as Yoplait fat free yogurt. So I was able to continue eating those things. Gluten does show up in some things that I wouldn't have thought would have it though. For example, my favorite mustard contains gluten. So it was on the no-no list.
Here are some of the GF foods that my wife and I have tried:
Since I'm pretty much a beerophile, I'll cover that first. I've only tried two GF beers. Both of them are sorghum-based. The first one I sampled was Anheiser-Busch's Redbridge. It wasn't bad. In fact I think it was better tasting than some of their beers that contain gluten. It is a little more expensive than things like Bud Light, but about the same price as what I pay for the beers that I normally drink. The other GF beer I tried is Bard's, which received good reviews on some of the Internet sites that I searched. I found it to be a lot more robust than Redbridge but it has a strong, sort of molasses, taste that takes some getting used to. It's pretty good once you get used to it though. In our area Bard's is harder to find than Redbridge.
If you're going to drink beer then you've got to have some snacks to go with it, right? So I tried a wide variety of GF snack foods. Chips are kind of a traditional beer munchie and I was glad to find that my favorite chips, Fritos, don't list any ingredients that appear to contain gluten, although the package doesn't specifically say that they are gluten free. I figured no gluten news is good news, so I ate 'em. Some chips, like Kettle and Boulder Canyon potato chips are labeled gluten free. Boulder Canyon also makes several types of rice and adzuki bean chips, which I had never eaten before but which are really tasty. I'd eat them again even if I wasn't on a gluten free diet. If adzuki beans aren't exotic enough for you, try Arico Natural Foods' CrispRoot cassava root chips. Good stuff.
Of course sometimes you need sweet snacks. I tried quite a few of those. I really liked Immaculate Baking Co.'s Chocolate Chunk cookies. They come as little dough balls that you have to bake yourself but they are good enough that you can't tell that they are gluten free. Enjoy Life's Lively Lemon and Gingerbread Spice cookies are already baked, soft cookies. They're not bad but IMHO they aren't as good as the Immaculate Baking Co. cookies. Lucy's Cinnamon Thins remind me of Pecan Sandies without the pecans. I also tried vanilla cream sandwich cookies from KinniToo. I wasn't crazy about those. They're so sweet that they made every orifice on my body pucker up when I ate them. I wouldn't buy them again. We also tried some kind of cookie from Pamela's Products. I don't remember the flavor but I do remember that they were good.
For a healthier snack I tried several flavors of GF granola from Udi's Gluten Free Foods. To be honest, I mostly ate them for breakfast on top of yogurt rather than as a snack. They were good though. I also ate Enjoy Life's Cinnamon Crunch Granola for breakfast rather than a snack. It was good, although I kicked it up a notch with some dried fruit and walnuts. I tried scads of GF breakfast/cereal/energy bars from Enjoy Life, Soyjoy and Larabar, among others, and liked all of them pretty well.
I like hummus and, while most of the hummus I've run across doesn't specifically claim to be gluten free, I couldn't find any ingredients listed that looked as though they had gluten in them. So I ate hummus on Mary's Gone Crackers Original crackers as well as Crunchmaster's Multi-Seed crackers and Rice crackers. I liked all of them.
I guess I mentioned some breakfast stuff above. That was one area where I was sort of unhappy with the GF choices that I tried. If I'm going to have cereal for breakfast I usually eat Post Great Grains Raisons, Dates and Pecans and kick it up several notches by adding walnuts and dried and fresh fruit. Even after adding the fruit and walnuts to the GF cereals that I tried, they paled in comparison to my usual breakfast cereal. In addition to the Enjoy Life granola I mentioned above I tried Rice Chex (muy bland) and Barbara's Peanut Butter & Chocolate Puffins (not as bland as Rice Chex but none too exciting). Another GF breakfast thing my old girl and I tried was Pamela's Baking and Pancake Mix. My wife made pancakes with it and they were good, although she had to add some GF Bisquick to the mix because we only had a sample packet and it didn't make as many pancakes as we needed. She also added some walnuts and dried cranberries. Tasty. I don't usually eat frozen waffles but I tried Van's frozen GF toaster waffles and they are as good as non-GF toaster waffles.
My wife has made a lot of GF meals from scratch but occasionally we like to have a frozen entree for dinner. In general they cost two to three times as much as a comparable non-GF entree. However, I have tried several Amy's frozen GF entrees, which are priced about the same as non-GF entrees at our local supermarket, and they were great. This is another one of those things that I would eat even if I wasn't on a GF diet. My favorite is Black Bean Tamale Verde. In the "not frozen entree but not made from scratch either" category we liked San Gennaro GF Polenta with sun-dried tomatoes and garlic. We eat a lot of pasta and were worried that we'd have to give that up for the duration of the GF experiment. Fortunately there seem to be quite a few brands of GF pasta to choose from so we were able to substitute that for our usual pasta. The only GF pasta we tried was Schar Multigrain Penne Rigate. It wasn't quite as tasty as the whole wheat pasta that we usually eat and it was a lot chewier, but it wasn't bad.
Next to beer the GF food that has been the biggest disappointment to me has been bread and bread-like products (bagels, English muffins, etc.). After one bite my wife decided to stick with her non-GF bread so I got to be the lone guinea pig on this one. Most of the GF bread products that I tried were not very tasty and they were usually quite dense. Also, almost all of them fell apart when any liquid touched them, which made a real problem for me, since I am the king of condiments and like to slather my sandwiches with all kinds of relishes and load them up with pickled veggies of myriad types and tastes. I had bad sandwich experiences with multi-grain bread from GNI and locally purchased buckwheat bread from a woman who bills herself as The Gluten Free Queen. Both of those breads worked OK as toast with peanut butter or jelly on it, which they both needed because they were not too tasty without it. The best GF sandwich bread from a more or less national company that I have found is Rudi's Multi-Grain bread. It not only holds up better in sandwiches, but also tastes better than the two I mentioned previously. The absolutely best GF bread I have found by far is a rosemary focaccia bread that we picked up in a local GF restaurant called the Wildwood Art Cafe. It holds up well in a sandwich and tastes like non-GF artisan bread. Two thumbs up on that one. My wife tried baking some GF bread at home. She used Bob's Red Mill GF Cinnamon Raisin Bread Mix. It wasn't bad, but it suffered from the same texture and taste problems as most of the rest of the GF breads we tried. It was OK toasted with a little organic apple butter on it though. Although we often have sandwiches for lunch, we tend to eat more wraps than sandwiches at our house. Most of the time we use burrito-size Smart & Delicious whole wheat and oat tortillas from La Tortilla Factory to make them. When I decided to go gluten free our first thought was that we would just substitute corn tortillas for a GF wrap, but we couldn't find any that were big enough. Eventually we bought some wrap-size Food for Life brown rice tortillas. They tasted fine but had a tendency to break up when we used anything with any liquid on them. See the item about the king of condiments above.
I like peanut butter so I used that to make the GF breads a little more palatable. I had checked out the ingredients in my favorite PB, Jif Reduced Fat Creamy, and didn't see anything that looked as though it would have gluten in it. Never-the-less I decided to try a GF peanut butter. The one I chose was Earth Balance Creamy, No Stir, Natural Peanut Butter with Flaxseed. I was pretty happy with it. It was tasty, smooth and creamy and it didn't separate in the jar. The only negative thing I could say about it is that it has more fat than my regular peanut butter.
We tried more GF foods than I've documented here but these foods illustrate the spectrum of pre-packaged GF foods available at our local supermarket and at places like Sprouts and Natural Grocer. My overall impression is that GF foods are more expensive than the equivalent non-GF foods and, with some notable exceptions, not as tasty. There is a wide variety of them, however, and someone with celiac disease or a serious gluten allergy should be able to find a GF substitute for any food they are used to. Given the large number of people who are alleged to have some degree of gluten allergy, my guess is that the variety and quality of GF foods will only improve. Hopefully the price will come down as well.
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