Going gluten-free - where to start? - £200 voucher plus signed copies of Budget Gluten-free to be won

[CeriMumsnet]

Going gluten-free can be a challenge, especially when it comes to budgeting. For those of you who are gluten-free, what would your top tips be? What are your favourite gluten-free products? How do you stick to a budget on a gluten-free diet?

And if you’re just starting or even have been following a gluten-free diet for a while what questions or concerns do you have? Becky Excell, author of new book Budget Gluten Free will be online in the next few weeks to answer some of your questions.

Everyone who posts on this thread by 18 March will be entered into a prize draw where one lucky winner will win a £200 voucher plus a signed copy of Budget Gluten Free by Becky Excell. 9 runners up will also win a signed copy of the book.

*Don't forget to also take part in the poll below about the cost of a gluten-free weekly shop (according to Coeliac cost of living report 2024) - the answer will be revealed on this thread next week!

T&Cs

If you can't pay extra for things like flour / bread / pasta, don't eat them - the gluten-free alternatives are expensive, and there's no way around that. Rice and potatoes are your friends. Eggy things for breakfast, salads with a good protein source for lunch, stuff with rice or potatoes for dinner. Make a bit too much potato / veg and put them in your morning omelette. Accept that biscuits and cakes are off the menu and learn to make things like chocolate mousse, or have cream or ice cream with fruit.

You don't, really - if you're coeliac you just accept it like any other allergy that has you shitting your guts out for three days afterwards (or any other highly unpleasant side effect) and recognize that the pain isn't worth the pleasure.

Yeah. Though I seem to get symptoms whether I eat gluten or not 🙄

But regardless, to avoid long-term damage, I'm strictly GF, and I really miss proper crumpets, edible croissants, fresh baguette, stretchy wraps, decent pizza, piadine, focaccia, proper pasta, farmhouse loaf, etc. etc. etc. every single day.

Why would I get over missing something I spent decades enjoying and taking for granted as my staple food source in all its various forms? I think I probably feel like most people would if they were told they had to change almost every aspect of what they eat, including lots of staples and favourites, and develop almost eating-disorder levels of paranoia about their food being contaminated with an omnipresent substance that almost nobody else takes seriously as a risk.

I always felt sorry for coeliacs, before, and felt glad I wasn't one of them. Even though I knew it wasn't logical, it kind of felt like… they were coeliacs, and they had to live differently, and it must be hard, but they were used to it, and somehow they coped, but I wouldn't be able to. And now I am one of them, and I cope, but I'm also exactly the same person I was before except I can't have a lot of the things I like and can only have shit overpriced versions of others. I can't even eat proper fucking Doritos.

If I want, I dunno, ready meal cottage pie, (because, amazingly, CD didn't turn me into some kind of domestic paragon), I can't buy the one I fancy, or the one that fits my budget. No, I pore over the labels until I find the one that doesn't happen to have gratuitous wheat flour in it, whether that's the Budgeto Brand 3% Beef Hi-Gristle Cottage-Style Pie-Style Food Substance, or Jimmy Meekins' Mega Bangin' Premium Wagyu Fillet Cottage-With-A-Mortgage Pie. Or the Free-From one, I suppose. Which costs about the same as Jimmy's but looks about as appealing as a bag of used plasters and serves 0.3 elderly hamsters. At a push.

But all that pales in comparison to missing spontaneity, sharing, community, exploration, discovery, and all the other things you miss out on when you can't risk a trace of gluten in your food. Can't accept a friend's dinner invitation without risking causing them hassle and worrying about the awkwardness if you can't be sure they've got it right. Can't stop off for lunch in town on a whim. Can't just join in with group outings and events. Can't travel without gf snacks secreted about your person. I watch a YouTube video about delicious-looking food sold by vendors in Malaysia, or Ghana, or wherever, and know that I'll never be the tourist who can just try what I like the look of — I've got to research in advance, prepare alternatives, learn how to ask complicated questions to people I may struggle to communicate with, or I guess just stay at home and eat baked potatoes and rice and yesterdays reheated leftovers until I die.

Don't get me wrong, there's much shitter things than coeliac disease. But it's still shitty and we don't automatically develop some ability to "get over" missing hundreds of things we used to enjoy.

Egg noodles are made of egg and wheat.

Totally. It isn't a choice whether to get over something or not; you feel what you feel. And as you say, it's not just the missing the actual taste, it's the community aspect of food and the inconvenience and cost and all that. One thing that can help, though, is to remind yourself that the idea of a "staple" is really quite a weird one, when you consider that there are literally thousands of foods humans can eat. We've been around for 200,000 years as a species, and only eaten grains at all for about the last 12,000. It's pretty weird when you stop to think about it, how reliant we've allowed ourselves to become on this one (quite boring really, before you add other stuff to it) species, wheat. It can help to think of it as something that pushes you to eat a greater variety of things instead of always falling back on the same stuff. You can't change the whole food culture that you live in and the way that wheaty things are so often the default, but you can learn to love your more varied and interesting diet.

Are you sure your problem is gluten? I mean, JUST gluten? Totally possible to be coeliac and have another allergy on top of that (I know, some people are just born lucky). If you're still getting symptoms, it might warrant further investigation.

Unfortunately, being coeliac is a bit like being vegan or anything else that's quite severely restrictive - unless you're happy to just accept food being mostly a source of stress and misery forever, you pretty much do have to get into cooking. You have to learn maybe 6 or 8 things that you can cook in 15min without having to think about it, and hopefully that you can batch cook, and that will give you energy and the right nutrients and actually fill you up (unlike, as you say, most ready meals). It can suck in the short term, but it can also, after a while, become second nature - and when you see how much better you feel (and even look) it motivates you to keep going.

Markses have a good range of GF sarnies, unfortunately all with cheese or mayo in.

When I realised that I did so much better without gluten, I hoped that my other intolerances might calm down but nope, lactose, histamine, citrus and, as I've more recently discovered, egg still all cause me problems. The histamine is the biggest pain because it's a lot of foods. I blocked the loo a couple of times before realising that dry aged beef was one of the culprits 🫢 (as if the racing heart and insomnia hadn't been a clue).

@Elsvieta Thanks for your response, and I know you're trying to be helpful, but my diet is not more varied and interesting now I'm a coeliac. Before I was a coeliac, when it comes to starches our meals might include red rice, sweet potatoes, pulses, quinoa, taro, plantain, Chinese yam, rice noodles, fufu, cornbread and so on as well as rice/potatoes/bread/pasta. (BTW, just because I mention wanting to occasionally have access to the convenience of a ready meal, it doesn't mean I can't tell one end of a potato peeler from another.) I could go to any restaurant with any cuisine I fancied without a second thought. Huge swathes of food are now out, because they might have once been in the same warehouse as some barley, or shared a kitchen with a wheat flatbread.

There is no way that having to eliminate gluten allows you to have a more varied diet. It might force you out of a very rigid diet, if that's what you had before, but in that case you'll probably just find a new rigid gluten-free diet.

This trope of telling new coeliacs (which I'm not) to see this as a wonderful opportunity to learn to cook all kinds of lovely homemade stuff and develop a more varied diet is something that irritates me. I remember feeling like I was being pissed on and told it was glitter. If I can eat it now, I could eat it before, and I probably did. There's nothing new and exciting in this. Just restriction and faff.

But I am also part of a cultural tradition (well, several) going back thousands of years that's got wheat twined through it. It's in the traditions. It's in the religions. It's in our childhoods and our memories and our relationships. It's everywhere. So I miss it, because I'm human and I grew up with it. (Imagine telling people from any other part of the world, with some other frequently-used crops, that their cultural foods and traditions are a weird idea, and that they should ponder the varied diets of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers.) And because it's ubiquitous, it's very hard to avoid it. So I also miss lots of things that aren't wheat but which our system doesn't keep separate from it. When it comes to this topic I don't care even a tiny bit about the recency of agriculture on the scale of human history as a whole. The fact is that wheat has been a staple in this part of the world for thousands of years, so it is part of our history and our culture and still surrounds us at every turn.

I know this sounds like pure self-pity and nothing else (and TBH I used to feel sorry for coeliacs, and now I am one, I haven't stopped feeling sorry for coeliacs 🤣). But sometimes on threads like this I want to share the reality of CD for me, that it can be pretty hard in some ways and you don't have to pretend that it's actually a marvelous opportunity to learn to cook your own courgette ribbon lasagne.

Vegan food taking over and pushing out the gluten free food makes me so mad. I know its not the vegans' fault, its the shops' fault, but its terrible that they remove food that is essential for at least 1% of the population, for food that isn't essential.

In my country they give disability payments for children with coeliac disease, until they're 16, when its suddenly not a disability any more

But what ice cream? If it's dairy based, it might be OK, assuming it isn't cross contaminated with the cookie dough biscottti fish food caramel type that ran through the production line beforehand. Unless they decided to use wheat/barley/malt as a flavouring or stabiliser.

And if your constant being gluten by cross contamination means your gut had been damaged so much you can't have dairy, you're back to the vegan ones - which usually have wheat in them for texture. Or oats, which many coeliacs also react to because the protein is very similar to gluten - or they're standard and not guaranteed gluten free oats due to being grown, harvested and produced in the same factory as wheat/barley. Or the wheat is there for the cookie wotsit flavour. Or was on the production line last.

Just eat ice cream. Simple, eh?

What's the best flour to use to give you the best gluten free pasta and bread - and are there any other GF additives you can add to make the texture more equal to wheat flour ?

I make most things from scratch anyway but most meals are quite easy to adapt to be gf, I've been coeliac for over 10 years and it's been nice to see the advancements in the range of foods readily available.

For the newbies among us Becky has a book called "How to Make Anything Gluten Free" which has some absolutely cracking recipes if you're missing a takeaway, plus on her website she has the most amazing char siu pork and Singapore noodles recipes which are hands down better than any I've had from a takeaway.

I find Fioreglut gluten free flour expensive but worth it for pizza bases, wraps, flatbreads etc.

I've recently been making bread with a mixture of brown rice flour, teff flour and tapioca starch and it turns out quite nice, certainly better than the premade mixes. The best gf bread I've tried was made with millet flour in the mix but I've not been able to find the flour in the shops.

We rarely buy GF bread due to how processed it is and also cost. (I did buy some reduced Juvela to freeze though as it is nice to have toasted sandwiches etc for a change sometimes !)
instead we try and make filling things using whole foods like chickpeas, lentils/ dahl , sweet potatoes, egg fried rice (I've learnt how to make a good one now, always start with cold rice! And include lots of butter if can, and veg!)
DD also loves bean noodles which she adds garlic , soy sauce, ginger and sesame oil to.

Hopefully, she's using GF tamari and not bog standard soy sauce, as that's made with wheat.

Thanks *NeverDropYourMooncup, *yes she is and has been GF for years . But maybe could have been clearer for anyone newer to avoiding gluten x

thank you ! really helpful - I will pass this on - do you have the exact quantities ?

We have also found the GF bread is 🤢

We use potato waffles as a toast substitute. The game changer was finding that you can cook them in the toaster in minutes.

It means that the GF member of the family can have the same 'on toast' lunches as everyone else but with potatoey bread.

Hash browns are usually GF too.

Though Sainsbury's one aren't — many of the frozen potato products that are okay from other supermarkets are a may contain at Sainsbury's.

Had a bit of a coeliac moment earlier today — had a grocery delivery, noticed a thin layer of white powder on a couple of the items and thought, "Urgh, hope that's just cocaine or rat poison or something".

Cardamom & peach quinoa porridge made with almond milk is the best breakfast - sometimes a quick supper.

My tip is to invest in a bread maker (I got a second hand one - almost brand new for £10) and try different bread recipes, I use almond flour, milk powder, and a trick I learned - a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar.

We’ve been finding our way around being gluten free for the last 8 years since our youngest child was diagnosed coeliac at 4. It’s definitely more expensive than standard food with gluten, but it has got a lot easier to manage over time. We have found the alternatives she likes that we can buy and others that we can make and worked out the things she can live without. We’re compiling our own collection of recipes that have worked for us for her to take with her when she leaves home / is cooking alone. My top tips would be xanthum gum for cakes and psyllium husk for bread and pizza dough and an extra egg in pancake batter (along with a little xanthum gum). Also, it is worth looking online abroad for things you might be desperate for that aren’t available in the uk - we have found gluten free cinnamon buns online (the one recipe I have not yet managed to get as soft and fluffy as when I make them with gluten - any tips very welcome!).

Doves Farm flour, oats, eggs, berries make the best oatcakes for packed lunches

Best advice would be to stay away from the gluten free aisle your supermarkets and learn to batch bake and make use of your freezer for breads, and oat type snacks. I need to try GF pasta - and would LOVE any tips for anyone who has suceeded.