An Honest Review of Gluten Free Baking by Delicious Alchemy

 

Look how pretty the box is!!

Not to brang..#bragging. I won most sarcastic UK blogger yesturday voted for by UKBloggers. We all know how sarcastic us brits are..so I must be on another level, haha!
Anyway..

 I try to give a complete representation of all diets to make them equal, but if one takes my fancy I will obviously talk about it more and explain why I like it.I’ve got a tonne to talk about this product, negatives and positives so I’m going to keep the intro brief!

So, When I was approached by Delicious Alchemy for a review on their gluten free bread mixes, I was sceptical, I mean it’s bread made out of potato flakes and rice, who wouldn’t be? But..It’s great for people who can’t eat gluten and wheat!
So Celiac and paleo’s look out, there’s no gluten about..

The delivery box came the next day and I really only expected a brown parcelled bag with my name scrawled across it, this is what came. I mean come on, that’s a bloody adorable box.. The colour scheme is vintage pastels with pink blue and green stripes!

Inside my review box:

Anyway, So I was expecting some flour, maybe a small bag of white flour for 6 muffins and similar for brown flour. Every time I do review (not that often) I’m always surprised at what I receive..

I received;

• Two white flours,
• One brown,
• bag of ‘rice flakes’ in place of porridge.

Not what I was expecting at all, the price is only around £8 for the full box, delivered! It’s really nice that they have faith in me to taste it and review it on their behalf.

The Bake:
So the bake..well I did a few, For the cake it went really well I thought, It smelt wonderful throughout the process. I wanted to do the classic so I could really understand the mixture. I started off my first bake with the basic bread mixture, it mixed well so I got my hands involved so I could really feel it;

• It was elastic,
• Heavy and thick (like a strong brown bread mixture)
• It smelt slightly of play-doh, I think that’s the potato flakes in the mixture.
• The residue on my hands dried really quickly and lead to them being incredibly dry**

**My hands were dry like I’d had a salt bath, my skin was irritated until I put some hand cream back on (Which I never use by the way).

It requires a short proving time and then just press into a lined tin, done! Hey presto! Instead of the classic sliced bread I made some scones, for eggs..muffins and just one the go snacks. I made a cake and muffins.

I let them, the muffins, prove for 3 hours instead of the 1 it said on the instructions, big mistake…Why don’t I follow instructions??

Once I popped them out of the proving bag I could smell fermentation, it happened so quickly! Non the less I cooked them, as I’ve not used the mixture before and didn’t know if that smell was supposed to happen. They looked fine on cooking, they went golden brown and were nice and firm, they still had that beer smell but seemed fine!

The muffins:I froze 4 and ate the rest with my family for breakfast the next morning, my father turned his over to find black spots (He always finds the dodgy ones!) 6 of the 7 had dark black ‘mould’ spots on them, I couldn’t see how they could ferment so quickly! It was such a shame as the flavour of them was really great for a gluten free bread! 

The cake I made baked perfectly, It baked just like cake it was perfect, dense and chewy just like a ‘normal’ cake! It was a heavy mixture as I made it as per..

The Oat flakes were the best in the box! It was just a 2 minutes cook, stir and then another 2 minutes. Pow, done!

Update 11/12/15 Making Pastry!
I recently used my remaining white bread mix to make pastry! It worked perfectly! I try to review things as honestly as possible so to write a negative review really gets to me, the company wouldn’t send me a product if it didn’t work.
So I adapted and changed to fit in with the things I like…

So, I made a Gluten Free version of my classic Butternut squash (pumpkin pie style pie)!
All I did was double up the oil in the recipe for the bread mix and made it around 3-5mm thick pastry (the bread mix makes three 8″ pies cases). They were wonderful and as they’re filled with flavour they turned out perfectly.

The Taste:

Other then the issues with the bake both things I cooked had a good flavour to them, they weren’t fake tasting but they weren’t quite right, but that’s to be expected when you eat bread a certain way for 24 years. I have to say, that the muffins were a bit ‘stodgy’ the bread was hard and firm, like it was an old baguette and the cake was soft and dense but didn’t carry much flavour (like you’d expect in a brown bread).

However, on the plus side after my update in the baking section I have to say as far as a gluten free flour mix this really can work for several other types of bake, the taste still isn’t there but it can be substituted for other styles of cooking, other than bread.

The Oat flakes were the best in the box! It was just a 2 minutes cook, stir and then another 2 minutes. Pow, done! It was obviously just rice so it didn’t have that flavour of porridge but with some honey and raisins it was perfect for breakfast! It really reminded me of porridge except it was light and fluffy.

Overview:
I’ve sounded really negative about this one and I’m truly sorry because really, It’s a gluten-free bread, it’s like driving a Volvo when you’ve only ever had Mercedes, what do you expect?
It’s a better, healthier alternative, so it’s going to have it’s draw backs but they’re nothing in comparison to your health! Oh and for people who really can’t eat gluten (I struggle, but can manage) these are the people that won’t care about the stodgy bread, they would flourish in the fact that they can eat something similar to bread regardless and that is the beauty of Gluten free.

I’m hoping that I’ve been critical in the best possible way, by giving you my opinions on both the good things and the new things I’ve learnt from the bad things. Since having the product, the first 2 weeks of using it I hated it and couldn’t understand why it would be sent to me as a ‘good product’. This lead me to making changes to the basic ‘bread’ recipes and I then made pastry with it. Since then I’ve loved the product! I tried it as a plain pastry too, I made a small circular base and ate that like a crisp flat bread and it was lovely!
 So what I’m saying is, this

Ugh, So much information, sorry! I just wanted to make sure it was a well-rounded full informative review!