Can you help me with a gluten free buffet please?

[OrchidLass]

I'm having a get together in the garden in a few weeks and one of the guests has coeliacs so I don't want to run the risk of cross contamination and make him ill. Normally I would tons of breads and pasta salads out but I need some ideas of what to serve for a lovely, gluten free buffet please.

Gluten free pasta is actually quite nice and fairly cheap so that’s one. I’d ask them what they like as there is plenty of Choice but you don’t want to go all out on breads and pizza and they taste like cardboard. Or they might quite like them.

Gluten free crackers or crisp breads tend to be tasty and much more like the real thing and less like cardboard

Rice salads, use red and wild rice which are nutty flavoured
Taboulleh
Potato and chive salads
Avocado, tomato mozzarella salads
Corn pasta salads

Tesco have recently upped their game so you can get GF quiches now. I’d go with GF pasta salad (IMO Barrillo GF pasta is the best), salads, rice, chicken drumsticks. Supermarkets also do a range of cakes that are GF and there’s a choice of cake mixes if you want to bake yourself.

Potato salad, rice salad, pasta salad made with GF pasta (Asda GF pasta is very reasonably priced, just watch like a hawk as it goes from al dente to mush in seconds, Garafolo GF pasta from Ocado is nice but expensive), coleslaw, cooked GF sausages (Heck, Black Farmer, M&S, Co Op all good for GF sausages), hummus and crudities, nachos (most plain ones are GF but check the label) and guacamole/salsa, spanish omelette/ frittata. You might want to do normal bread and put it on a separate table as GF bread is expensive and rank (and I've been eating it for 20+ years)

Gf pasta is perfectly acceptable for everyone so make the pasta salads with that . Be free do a very nice pizza base to make some pizzas . Most supermarkets sell GF sausages / burgers for a BBQ , also lots of hotdogs are GF .Schar do ciabatta rolls that work as hotdog rolls / burger rolls .

Mini corn on the cob
Veg or meat skewers
Mini filled jackets
Falafel
Salmon fishcakes
Three bean salads with vinaigrette
Canelli bean with green beans salad
The usual chicken, ribs, gluten free sausages

Which supermarkets do you have near you? And how many people are you catering for?

You can still make pasta salads, just use gluten free pasta! Also, rice is gluten free if you want to do rice salad.

Most GF bread is pretty dire, but the stuff that is nice is also expensive unfortunately. Warburtons tiger loaf is really nice. I've heard M&S tiger rolls are very nice but not tried them myself.

Cheese is GF, sliced meats (although double check the ingredients as some are bulked out and have wheat flour added).

Aldi do some gorgeous sweet potato pakoras along with a few other flavours, they're all gluten free. Lidl do similar, think they sell the Gosh brand, can also get them in Tesco.

If you're in to baking then glutenfreecuppatea is a fantastic site by a lady called Becky Excell. She recently released her first book and it's fabulous. Her recipes are very easy and work really well.

Crudites and dips (check the ingredients for the dips).

Basically, anything you buy check the ingredients - a product doesn't have to be labelled as gluten free to actually be gluten free if that makes sense (lots of naturally gluten free food). You're looking out for BROW - barley, rye, oats and wheat (oats themselves are gluten free but usually milled on the same line as flour, so you would need to ensure it was gluten free oats). Also look for any may contain warnings, as may contain is not suitable for coeliacs.

@CMOTDibbler

Potato salad, rice salad, pasta salad made with GF pasta (Asda GF pasta is very reasonably priced, just watch like a hawk as it goes from al dente to mush in seconds, Garafolo GF pasta from Ocado is nice but expensive), coleslaw, cooked GF sausages (Heck, Black Farmer, M&S, Co Op all good for GF sausages), hummus and crudities, nachos (most plain ones are GF but check the label) and guacamole/salsa, spanish omelette/ frittata. You might want to do normal bread and put it on a separate table as GF bread is expensive and rank (and I've been eating it for 20+ years)

Warburtons tiger loaf is really nice (but expensive!). Also, we buy the 4 pack of white rolls from Morrisons which cost £1, they are really good.

Some great suggestions here. I would recommend avoiding bread altogether (or have gf bread if you have to) because cross contamination is a real thing and just a casual breadcrumb swiped into the butter dish or a bread roll torn open above another dish would be enough to make them ill.

Tabbouleh but made with quinoa is gf and tasty
Selection of meats and cheeses
The salads people mention but in addition a Greek salad or a watermelon and feta salad. Rice noodle salad is also good.
Loads of different dips with vegetable sticks.
Can make your own sushi just check the wasabi and get tamari rather than soy sauce.
Puff pastry pinwheels made with ready roll gf pastry.

Things to look out for with hidden gluten or that most wouldn't think of - Worcestershire sauce, some bbq sauces, stock cubes, own brand diet coke, crisp flavourings, soy sauce and ready made packets such as rice.

@Ilovefluffysheep I buy the Warburtons tiger loaf, and for GF bread it is really good. However I would still never inflict it on anyone who didn't need to eat GF

Just cater as normal - most salad things are naturally gluten free - and provide gf bread/crackers/pizza just for the coeliac guest.
They would be upset that you had forced everyone into a full coeliac buffet.
Most coeliacs are very fussy about the brand of bread/crackers they prefer so best to ask. Some are great, others like cardboard.
Dessert is easy to do gf but again so long as you provide one gf option, you can do whatever you normally would.

As a coeliac myself who has been through many a nerve-wracking buffet, one piece of advice I would give you is to LABEL everything very clearly! It's hard to navigate a buffet when you are coeliac and can't tell which crackers / salad / sides are gluten-free and which are not. Believe me, seeing a gluten-free label takes away so much of my anxiety and stress because then I know I don't have to worry and I don't have to bother the host by asking 'is this gluten-free?' 'is this ok for me?' etc.

It might also make other diners aware not to cross-contaminate by mixing serving spoons from the gluten-y dishes into the gluten-free stuff.

Thanks for thinking of your coeliac guest! You have some great suggestions for recipes here. One thing to note: tabouleh is not naturally gluten-free so you would have to adapt the recipe to make it gluten-free e.g. by using quinoa as suggested upthread.

M&S and Asda do delicious burgers, sausages etc aimed at everyone which just happen to be gf.

All my buffets/ bbqs are gluten free

I generally do potato salad, as well as warm boiled/roasted baby potatoes with herbs and salt on, sausages, burgers, cold chicken drumsticks, coleslaw, a rice/bean salad. A cheese board and cold cut meats

The usual dips and crudités

You can get Pringle type crisps from Lidl (they aren't special gluten free ones, they just happen to be gluten free)

Morrison's do a great gluten free pepperoni pizza from the freezer, they also have mozzarella sticks and some great gluten free crackers.
I generally make my own gluten free sausages rolls, quiches and scotch eggs and pork pies but you can generally buy pretty good ones from M&S if it's just for one person.

The best gf bread buns you can buy are the warburtons gluten free super soft square rolls, they are very new so you do have to hunt for them. M&S ones will do if you can't find them.

A cheese board and cold cut meats

Just make sure people don't double dip in dips etc and let the coeliac go first before everyone else starts dropping crumbs everywhere and you should be fine.

I tend to keep anything that has got gluten in (e.g buns for the non coeliacs) away from everything else and separate some butter off as well. It's the gluten eaters that are treated as the pariahs for a change

I’d put all the gf stuff up one end of the table , if you are doing bread put different bowls of butter / spreads/ dips / oils etc so that there is less of a contamination issue . There was an ad a few years ago where they put the gf stuff on different coloured plates so it was easy to tell . If you want to buy a cake Sponge do lovely gf ones that are perfectly acceptable to non coeliacs as well .

I meant to say earlier, thank you for offering to make your whole buffet gluten free. It's a really kind and generous thing to do, and I'm sure your coeliac will really appreciate it. They will certainly appreciate having no cross contamination issues at the buffet, as that can be a huge issue normally.

As someone else suggested, it might be worth keeping wrappers/labelling things just for reassurance. As a coeliac it can be quite difficult to trust other people's catering as you worry if they might have missed a sneaky ingredient or may contain warning. Gluten can pop up in the strangest of places (a lot of Morrisons pre packaged salad and veg has may contain warnings for example!).

If you do do any bread products (and to be honest it's probably not worth it) or anything that needs butter, make sure it's a fresh one that hasn't been used by you in your house before, as even a crumb can cause coeliacs huge problems.

Spanish tortilla is gf, rice salad obviously, use gluten free pasta, most sausages are gf these days, so make your own gf sausage rolls perhaps ... but personally I would either rethink the menu to something naturally gf or do a small gf selection for that guest and put inside

Baked sweet potatos are super easy.
Halloumi and veg skewers
Prawns
Avocado salad
Quinoa (keenwa salad)
Home made vinaigrette
Homemade lamb burgers
Meringues and strawbs and vanilla icecream
Tortilla chips
Go easy on beans and lentils, that can mean farty pops for a lot of people

You can get frozen gf sausage rolls made by Genius who also make good gf bread.
Making your own gf pastry would be ridiculous if you wouldn't otherwise make your own flaky pastry to make sausage rolls. You can buy frozen Genius g/f pastry but you have to defrost it in advance.
G/f cake can be acceptable to non-coeliacs; pastry less so.
M&S do the best gf cakes - just buy for the coeliac though - get normal ones for other people. Most ice-cream is gf. Meringue is g/f.

I can't advise on lots of gluten free products, but think lots of brightly coloured fruits (strawberries, melon, watermelon pineapple) and veg (red orange yellow peppers, carrots cucumber, sweetcorn, sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes) and salads make a buffet look cheerful dotted between the other stuff people have recommended.

Ask them too. You get good at doing your own allergies. ( Dd allergic)

GF pasta is fine but you need to prepare it and serve it completely separately from the rest of the buffet, with separate serving spoons so no other guest double-dips with a spoon from the general pasta. Cross-contamination is really, really serious for coeliacs. I would even be inclined to ask the guest if he'd like to bring one dish himself – as a coeliac he's probably used to it and would appreciate you playing it safe.

Baby potatoes, rice salads, pear and blue cheese, green salad, cold roast Mediterranean veg... Lots of good ideas above.

Base it on rice and potatoes rather than bread and pasta. GF pasta is fine though.

Avoid anything covered in breadcrumbs unless specifically GF
A lot of sausages are GF anyway.
Don't use oxo stock cubes, they have gluten in.

most sausages are gf these days
I went searching in the supermarket for the special GF sausages. Couldn't find them so asked one of the assistants. They were hidden in plain sight: GF sausages are the default these days!