Making Your Kitchen Gluten Free
The biggest thing you have to worry about when you mixing gluten and gluten-free foods in your kitchen is cross-contamination. Does gluten jump out of the bread bag and accost your gluten-free products? Not really, but sometimes it seems as if it does. The bottom line is that if you’re not careful, you may start with a perfectly good gluten-free meal, and by the time you’re finished preparing it, it could be completely ensconced in gluten – sometimes without you even knowing it.
For example, flour. While crumbs don’t fly, flour does --EVERYWHERE. Flour flies. So you can’t prepare your gluten-containing pizza crust in the same area where you’re preparing a gluten-free pizza crust, because you’ll end up with two hybrids of sorts, and that’s definitely not what you’re after when you’ve spent the time and money on gluten-free pizza-crust ingredients.
When you’re cooking in a blended environment – one gluten-containing and one gluten-free, don’t even think about making them together unless you have separate pots or pans, stirrers, and servers. If you stir your gluten-free cake mix with the same spoon as you did your “regular” mixture, you just contaminated your lovely gluten-free mixture.
The good news is that you can not only mix foods in your kitchen, but you can even prepare gluten-containing and gluten-free foods at the same time. It just means you’ll need to take a few precautionary measures when you store and prepare foods.
You don’t need to buy new kitchen tools, but you do need to pay attention to how you use the ones you have. If you clean your kitchen items well, you’ll get the gluten off of them. Nonstick surfaces that clean easily and thoroughly are especially safe.
There are a couple of exceptions. I recommend having separate colanders and pasta servers if you’re making both gluten-containing and gluten-free pastas in your kitchen. Clearly label one as being gluten-free only so you don’t mix that one up with the one that you use for gluten-containing pastas. The reason I recommend separate items here is because pasta tends to leave a residue that’s sometimes hard to get off. You don’t want to drain gluten-free pasta in a colander that has remnants of the gluten-containing pasta on it. Same goes for the pasta servers, and even wooden spoons.
For example, flour. While crumbs don’t fly, flour does --EVERYWHERE. Flour flies. So you can’t prepare your gluten-containing pizza crust in the same area where you’re preparing a gluten-free pizza crust, because you’ll end up with two hybrids of sorts, and that’s definitely not what you’re after when you’ve spent the time and money on gluten-free pizza-crust ingredients.
When you’re cooking in a blended environment – one gluten-containing and one gluten-free, don’t even think about making them together unless you have separate pots or pans, stirrers, and servers. If you stir your gluten-free cake mix with the same spoon as you did your “regular” mixture, you just contaminated your lovely gluten-free mixture.
The good news is that you can not only mix foods in your kitchen, but you can even prepare gluten-containing and gluten-free foods at the same time. It just means you’ll need to take a few precautionary measures when you store and prepare foods.
You don’t need to buy new kitchen tools, but you do need to pay attention to how you use the ones you have. If you clean your kitchen items well, you’ll get the gluten off of them. Nonstick surfaces that clean easily and thoroughly are especially safe.
There are a couple of exceptions. I recommend having separate colanders and pasta servers if you’re making both gluten-containing and gluten-free pastas in your kitchen. Clearly label one as being gluten-free only so you don’t mix that one up with the one that you use for gluten-containing pastas. The reason I recommend separate items here is because pasta tends to leave a residue that’s sometimes hard to get off. You don’t want to drain gluten-free pasta in a colander that has remnants of the gluten-containing pasta on it. Same goes for the pasta servers, and even wooden spoons.
