Gluten, the protein found in wheat and related plants, seems to find itself in every aspect of food, from things as obvious as a loaf of bread to things as seemingly innocuous as ketchup, despite its reputation as a food allergen. Formerly resigned to sufferers of Crohn’s disease and other intestinal maladies, gluten-free eating has taken off in recent times – especially in the liberal-leaning land of the Pacific Northwest.
Gluten’s increasing negative reputation as a food allergen, combined with some weird symptoms not germane to this article, has led me to try and cut it out of my diet to troubleshoot whether it is the root cause of my recent allergy problems. Thanks to living in Eugene, that’s startlingly possible for me. A few weeks in, it hasn’t been particularly difficult for me. I miss beer, I miss Cheez-Its, I miss being able to grab whatever I want to eat and eating it without repercussion. But more than anything, I miss bread.
Growing up with my mom’s German cooking had me eating bread with nearly every meal regardless of time of day. It makes for the perfect foil for a meat-and-potatoes feast or for every lunch, supporting whatever meat or cheese you want it to.
The scale of my love of bread outstrips my childhood, too – my biography at the Oregon Daily Emerald says I have “an affinity for peanut butter sandwiches,” and I’ve been known to sit down and eat an entire loaf of French bread in one sitting just because I can.
Cutting that out of my diet has sucked, and that’s because the replacement is inadequate. Made with rice flour and sweetened with fruit juice, gluten-free bread is only adequate as a replacement courier to get peanut butter into one’s mouth.
From the moment you pick up a loaf, the density of the loaf makes it obvious that it’s not at all like regular bread. Imagine a sack of bread, and then imagine that there’s a pound of gravel in the bottom of the bag, and that’s what it feels like when it’s in your hand. That heaviness translates into a heavy taste, especially because the slices are about three-fourths as big as a slice of white bread and about twice as thick. Because gluten is what helps form the air pockets in bread, the familiar fluffy nature isn’t there in the rice flour bread, making for an awkwardly dense texture when all you want is a quick, easy sandwich.
Apart from its slightly smaller size, the bread itself doesn’t look that much different than a loaf of wheat bread. The crust is a dark brown, and the inside is a much lighter brown color, but the air pockets are generally half the size of ones in conventional bread, maybe the size of a BB at the biggest. There are no mammoth air pockets to be found.
There’s no real scent to the bread, one way or another, and it’s fairly tasteless when you first bite in. But if you mistakenly wait more than just a couple of seconds to take your next bite, you’re met with a bitter aftertaste that seems out of place in a sandwich. To someone who spent 22 years eating conventional breads in all their forms, the residual flavor from the gluten-free bread is quite off-putting, taking one of my favorite snacks and turning it into something I could barely slog through.
All I want to eat is a quality peanut butter sandwich, and I don’t know if or when I’ll be able to do that again. If my gluten-free bread experience continues, it can’t come soon enough.