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.

Threaded | Flat

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

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.

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.

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

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.