simont | (no subject)

Well, things aren't as bad as they seemed.

Pizza Express have turned out to be astonishingly clued up about gluten-free diets. (I hadn't expected a pizza-and-pasta shop to need to know about it at all: I'd assumed that coeliacs wouldn't be so silly as to set foot in the place. I only gave it a try because Owen googled up a blog entry by another coeliac who'd tried it and had a good experience.) They don't actually stock GF pizza bases, but they're quite happy to use one if I bring it along, and they were able to look over the starters menu with me and tell me what I could eat. (And in particular they left off one of the things that looked from the description as if it could reasonably have been safe, which somehow gives me confidence that they're not just guessing.) They even have a GF dessert on the menu – lemon polenta cake – which is really rather nice.

This was also an interesting experiment because it narrowed down the cause of my home-made pizzas lacking cohesion. When I make pizza from a base and some toppings, they never seem to stick together properly, and the toppings slide off all the time when I'm eating the result. It wasn't clear to me whether this was the fault of the base or of my preparation. I can now confidently state that it's the latter, since Pizza Express managed to make toppings stick properly to the same base that I failed to last week. I wonder how it's done.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Lots of goopy greasy tomato sauce and a good thick layer of glue^Wmozzarella to weight it down and stick the veg on?

You think I haven't tried that myself? :-) The last home-made pizza I cooked had more mozzarella than God. (Mind you, it didn't have very much God.) I suspect it's at least slightly more subtle than that, unfortunately...

Bella Pasta is also fairly clued up about people who have food allergies or have to avoid specific foods - they got a gluten free specific menu. They also have decent gluten free pasta, although its worth phoning them up before you go to find out if they've got any in stock or not.

I'd be interested in hearing if you do find any reasonable sized GF pizza bases; I've not come across any yet. The largest one I've found was about 8" and came in the form of the Dietary Specialist garlic & herb bread which isn't really a pizza base, but can be used as one.

My sister tells me I can get a Juvela one which she says is "about 8-10in" across. Mind you, the (as yet unresearched) impression I get is that Juvela specialise a bit in taking the gluten out of wheat flour, so it might turn out that their pizza bases are safe for me but not for you.

I've come across the taking of gluten from wheat to make it safe for coeliacs before now in breads and its true that its not a good idea for me to eat such food.

I have to wonder why the company is doing this as one of the reasons for using wheat is that its gluten content allows a framework for bubbles to form in dough made using wheat. If you remove the gluten you have to replace it with something else which does the same job, e.g. xanthium gum. The only reason I can think of is that people like the taste of wheat itself; I guess that its possible that there are other things in wheat which make it more suited than other grains to bread making.

So I went to Monday geek pizza after all yesterday, and will probably continue going back. The only snag is that the GF pizza bases I'm currently buying from Sainsburys are rather small; as a matter of moderate urgency I need to find some bigger ones.

Could you make your own? I certainly have done before and it is quite easy. I'm fairly sure there exists a GF flour replacement otherwise how could Sains. make them.

Yes, there are certainly GF flour substitutes, so in principle I suppose I could do that. But the nice thing about buying them is that they keep indefinitely, so I don't need to faff about preparing a base the day before I plan to be in a pizza restaurant.

Also it's interesting that you say it's easy, because my mother spent quite a lot of my childhood trying to find a good pizza dough recipe, and although she eventually came up with something that the rest of the family was happy to eat, it was never quite to my taste. So I was left with the feeling that making pizza bases was more subtle an art than it looked. I'd ask for your recipe, but it'd probably need extensive modification to work with GF flour anyway.

I suppose there are three possible conclusions we can draw

a) I can cook far better than your mother.
b) I have a lower expectation for Pizza bases.
c) I, by accident, found an ideal Pizza recipe.

I doubt a) or c) are likely hence we are left with b). One thing that might suggest the bases aren't too bad is that I make them with my automated bread maker (rather I make the dough and then roll it out myself) so it is more sorft and bread-like than one that one might make by hand.

WRT the keeping problem, they can quite easily be wrapped in cling=film and frozen. Then the problem reduces to remembering to take it out of the freezer in the morning.

Rich, why don't you try getting some gluten-free flour (+ whatever else is needed to replace normal flour) and seeing what happens to the recipe? It'd be an interesting experiment.

True, the other possibility is to create not-quite-pizza-bases. For example we often use Naan breads or french-sticks as bases which work nicely. Perhaps there exists some GF product which could be co-opted into being a base.

The problem with the GF flours is that they're not really suited for breads and doughs which require a period of time for the yeast to work. The reason for this is that its the gluten in the wheat which helps provide a structure for the bubbles of carbon dioxide which the yeast produces.

There are ways of providing this without using gluten - for example xanithum gum - but none of them really work as well as gluten when it comes down to it.

You also have to be careful in your choice of GF flour; for example if you get one which contains rice flour you'll find that the food will end up with a slightly gritty feel in the mouth when its eaten. Its unfortunate that the best general purpose gluten free flour - made by Dove's Farm (http://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/) - contains rice flour. On looking for that site, I've just found that Dove's Farm have increased their range of gluten free flours (http://www.dovesfarm-glutenfree.co.uk/gluten-free-flours.htm) and now have one designed for baking which involves yeast - it contains "natural gums" (I'm guessing xanithum gum here) to provide the structure for the dough to rise. It still contains rice flour though.

Pizza cohesion - have you tried drizzling olive oil over the base before you put the tomato sauce on?

Aaah, you mean cheating. No, I haven't, but now you mention it it wouldn't massively surprise me if that turned out to be the answer :-)

That's not cheating, it's how it's done! Also, make sure the tomato sauce is really thick when you put it on - the stuff out of jars is often too runny.

If you don't want to add more oil, you could score the surface of the pizza base lightly with a sharp fork to create a more ridged surface. But that really is cheating!

If I understand

zoutke correctly the sauce should be pretty thick indeed. Normal tomato sauce is not good enough. Either use 'passata rustica' or first let the sauce cook a little, that should make it thick enough.
That or buy a real wood-oven for the pizza. :-)
We use the rustica and fold the pizza like good Neapolitans, so no runoff problems.

I'd assumed that coeliacs wouldn't be so silly as to set foot in the place.

It makes sense when you think about it though - with pizza and pasta, the gluten is all in one big lump and easy to replace with a gluten-free substitute. With Asian and East Asian food, on the other hand, there will only be a little bit in a powdered spice, or in soy sauce - most non-coeliacs would think it insignificant, and in any case it's much harder to spot and rectify.