Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Excellent! November 2, 2008
Mickeyfreebs (UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a really good cookbook for those with dietary issues. I avoid gluten and dairy, and although this book was just gluten free, it is easy to substitute soy milk or other non-dairy ingredients for the recipes in the book.
I made the Christmas cake last Christmas, and will be baking it again for this Christmas. It had a lovely baked almond 'crust' and was really moist inside. I've made quite a few of their recipes and they've all turned out really well - banana bread, yorkshire puds and the like.
The recipes are really easy to follow and well laid out. Most of the ingredients are easy to get hold of too - which is always a bonus!
Building recipes triumphantly out of fresh ingredients October 17, 2008
Earthshaker (London, UK)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Once you or someone you cook for are diagnosed as coeliac, you have a choice: either you try to keep your diet much as it was using gluten-free alternative versions of products, or you construct a new dietary regimen based on the things that you can still eat without risk. Pasta embodies this choice: it is off limits to the coeliac in its normal form, so you can either buy the gluten-free version (harder to obtain, more expensive, and frankly a bit peculiar in its texture and taste) or you can switch to a different source of carbohydrate that does not contain gluten, such as rice or potatoes, and use that when previously you would have used pasta. If you are already used to cooking from scratch with fresh ingredients, the second option will not be daunting and will ultimately prove more satisfactory.
This volume works on that premise: building a strong and varied selection of recipes for all times of the day, for the most part out of basic ingredients that require no modification for the coeliac. Those recipes are at the book's core. Some of them display considerable ingenuity: cakes, as you would expect, are a particular challenge to the gluten-free chef, and this book rises well to that challenge. Rice flour, almonds and polenta often take the place of wheat flour, with all sorts of ingenious ways of keeping these moist and flavoursome: who could resist, for instance, Lady Dundee's Orange Cake, which begins by simmering oranges for an hour or two until tender, then putting them in their entirety into a blender - peel, flesh, pips and all - and liquidising them? In other areas of the book the need for ingenuity in avoiding gluten is less, and there will be occasions when you are surprised glancing over a recipe for risotto, for example, that the recipe is gluten-free because it seems so "normal" and lacking in any special difficulty. Which is, of course, the point I made at the start: it is possible to construct a perfectly acceptable, "normal" diet out of the numerous ingredients that are safe for the coeliac. The book is not, then, simply a guide to the things that are difficult to cook for a coeliac, but a balanced and rounded selection of all sorts of recipes, united by the fact one can be confident that anything in these pages is safe for a coeliac.
Recipes based on the ingredients requiring no modification are at the heart of the book. There is other material as well: a section of recipes to cook with gluten-free pasta, a whole section relating to basic carbohydrates such as breads or pizza bases, and an overview of the condition discussing which basic foodstuffs are safe and which off limits, buying gluten-free foods, eating out as a coeliac and so on. This would be suitable for a newly-diagnosed coeliac, their partner or, perhaps, someone about to get a visit from a coeliac relative or friend.
All in all, a balanced and wide-ranging book, with recipes of a high quality. You will find yourself passing recipes on to people who can eat gluten, and will hear them give that ultimate (and rather irritating) accolade, "you'd never know it was gluten-free". If you or your partner or child are coeliac, you will probably acquire a variety of recipe books as you explore the options open to you, but this will probably be the one you use most. If a friend or relative for whom you cook from time to time is coeliac, this is probably all you need, giving you a range of recipes that are appetising as well as safe, and a basic overview of the condition. Ultimately a recipe book stands or falls on the quality of the food described in it, and this, by building on those core ingredients that are safe, building on strengths rather trying to compensate for difficulties, passes that test with flying colours. Thoroughly recommended.
Lovely although a little complex... July 9, 2008
N. Humphrys (Surrey, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A well balanced array of recipes in all. The recipes call for a myriad of ingredients, I make a fab Vicky sponge just substituting normal SR flour for Gluten Free SR flour and I also substitute butter as my hubby and I are also allergic to dairy. I need a recipe book that I can whip up something from when I get home from work. This is a good book for impressing a gluten free sceptic with though! As with most recipe books you need to use this in conjunction with your own recipes.
 great recipe book November 25, 2007
J. Tyler (romford essex uk)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
brilliant easy to follow recipes which always work and are also a hit with non suffers of coeliac disease chocolate brownies are amazing
Some super tips January 6, 2007
Computer Girl (N Ireland)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is a good book, as it encourages the reader to use normal ingredients rather than prepacked mixes, and offers recipes for basics which I never imagined I could substitute. Some of the highlights include the great tip of using rice paper wrappers as a crunchy coating for fish (you won't miss batter), the soda bread recipe, and the breakfast health bar which went down a treat - no-one guessed there was anything odd about it, and it's the first time I have cooked with rice flakes. In fact, this book allows you to cook for yourself and others, without things tasting odd or artificial. Although many of the recipes are too high in fat for me (this applies to Irish cookery in general), I have successfully reduced the fat in all cases.
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