Flatbread

[charlie]

OMG I can't believe I haven't tried this before.

The safest, quickest bread ever, especially if you have run out of supplies and no time to shop.


Photo0847 by Charliemeg, on Flickr

Ingredients:
250g / 8oz / 2 cups plain (all purpose) flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon rapeseed or olive oil (can probably use any oil)
150 ml water

1) Sift the flour into a large bowl and add the salt.
2) Add the oil and water and form into a dough.
3) Turn onto a floured board or put in mixer with a dough hook and knead for about 5 minutes until elastic. Cover the dough with an upturned bowl and rest for at least 15 minutes.
4) When you are ready to cook divide the dough into about 8 pieces and roll out to around 2 - 3 mm thick on a floured board. Rest again for about 5 minutes.
5) Place a heavy-based non stick frying pan or cast iron griddle over a high heat and when its hot turn the heat down a bit. Have a plate lined up with a clean tea towel or a warm oven to keep them warm and soft once cooked.
6) Shake off any excess flour and carefully lay a flatbread in the hot pan. Let it sit for a minute or two until the dough looks set on top and has started to lift away from the pan. Flip over and cook for a further 30 to 45 seconds.

Serve while still warm for the best taste ever with meat, soup, egg, cheese, whatever takes your fancy. We didn't use all the dough on the first day so put leftover dough in the fridge covered in clingfilm and used the next day.

There are various adaptations of this using yoghurt, yeast etc but this is your quick and basic, I will try the others and post the adapatations as they work.

See hollandaise sauce and beef sandwich recipe for ideas on how to use these.

[urmensch]

Now that I know I can eat hard aged cheeses, but not other cheeses,
fructose intolerance seems more likely than gluten intolerance.
I have been experimenting with wheat breads.

No luck with plain french bread from local bakery. I think all commercial
bakeries add sugar to shorten the rise. From years of making gluten-free
bread I have all the equipment, and it is so much easier with wheat.

I started with the basic bread recipe lesson 1 from
www.thefreshloaf.com/lessons. This recipe has no sugar .
I used artisan grade unbleached white flour, and I had only a mild
reaction on my first batch. Nothing in this lour but hard red winter wheat.

On my second batch I used "all purpose" flour stocked in supermarkets.
This was a disaster. The bread looked OK, but I had a reaction. The
ingredients list had more than just wheat. There was also barley
malt and a long list of vitamins presumably from the "enrichment."

I then used the same recipe with a garbanzo/fava bean flour. The bread
didn't rise well, and it tasted horrible, but no reaction.

So now I am back with the artisan flour which seems to be OK. I just
use three long rises, and when I dust during kneading I use potato
flour (not the fine ground starch) instead of wheat. The theory is that the
wheat must be fully fermented for me to tolerate it.

The bread is very good if plain tasting. So I add a few chopped green
onions (supposed to be OK from what I gather). This give a nice
sour flavor. I bake two loaves at a time, cut them in half and freeze them.

If I make flat bread, I will need a recipe with yeast and a long rise.

[ukbill]

If you roll out the flat breads on coarse semolina instead of flour you get a lovely nutty flavour to the cooked breads

[nicoleh]

Hi Urmensch,
many people who are gluten intolerant do tolerate a good quality sourdough ok (not for a coeliac probably - too risky - but otherwise gluten intolerant ok) though not regular bread or unfermented flour, so it sounds like you might have some gluten intolerance - yay for sourdough! (with your 3 long rises you're reproducing similar effects to sourdough, though you might like to experiment with getting a "proper" starter.

lactose intolerance very often goes hand-in-hand with gluten intolerance. Do you think that the cheese thing sounds more like this? hard cheeses are practically lactose free, whereas soft cheeses have some remaining, especially ricotta and marscarpone.

I don't know if you're diagnosed fructose intolerance or not, but I just thought i'd suggest that you look at lactose with the cheeses as that makes a lot of sense. sorry if you already have!

[urmensch]

Hi Nicoleh. I responded in the sourdough thread. But you also raise
the issue of lactose here. I have had problems with milk all my life,
and the problem is not the common lactose intolerance. I *think*
I may have some kind of intolerance to fructose and galactose.
These monosacharides must be metabolized by the liver, and
the pathway is much longer than for glucose. So there is more
to go wrong. Anyway there are other dairy intolerant people
here, and when I found I could eat aged zero lactose (digests
into glucose and galactose) cheeses I decided I had found a
home.

What put me off was all that wheat. I am not sure about yeast
digesting the gluten. Gluten is what gives bread its strength
and texture, and the bread I bake is outstanding in this area.
Nice and chewy, it would make great pizza dough or
English muffins. I think it is more likely that celiac is
often misdiagnosed.

All grasses contain fructans in their cell walls, and I have a
contact allergy to all grasses. Of all the grains rice has the
lowest fructan content, then comes wheat. Barley is very
high. So white rice and refined wheat flour seem to be
the best bets for minimal fructans. I also think that something
goes on when grain is ground for flour. The grinding process
itself breaks down starches and fructans. I can eat some rice,
but even small amounts of rice powder in supplements give me
trouble.

I am learning a lot here. For the first time in years I am adding
things to the list of foods I can eat.

[nicoleh]

Hi Urmensch,
interesting! I would have thought that perhaps your 'contact allergy' is actually a standard immune response type allergy and that this possibly extends to an immune response on ingestion. the reason why fructans are a problem for most people with fructose malabsorption is because they are not absorbed and so they are fermented by colonic bacteria which results in the production of gas and leads to diarrhoea. so there's no reason to think that an FM patient would have any contact problems. contact usually means immune system, and it's certainly possible for you to have a crazy over-reactive immune system that really doesn't like lots and lots of foods!

In terms of galactose- you said you might have a problem with it - lactose is almost always removed from aged hard cheeses, but from what I can read, galactose is produced from lactose breakdown by bacteria during the cheesemaking process, and only SOMETIMES is the galactose further degraded into glucose before the cheese is ready to eat. So you may find some hard cheeses fine, others not so much.

Actually the metabolic pathway for breakdown of galactose is only 1 step longer than that of glucose. one extra enzyme which is missing in galactosemia. It is unlikely that you would have galactosemia as that is almost universally fatal in infancy if it isn't diagnosed - seeing as milk is deadly to galactosemics.

aaanyway - you are right htat the yeast doesn't do a lot to gluten. as I said in the sourdough thread the bacteria do, however if you weren't using a bacterial culture I don't think your bread would be gluten free. perhaps you do just need the sugars broken down or something.

coeliac disease is usually diagnosed by genetic screen and presence of antibodies to gluten in the bloodstream. I wouldn't think that either of those tests would be particularly susceptible to a lot of error. In my practice I've certainly seen lots of people who are very sensitive to gluten, as well as casein - potentially another source of your milk trouble?

a test would be to see how you went with your artisan flour but without the 3 long rises. if you could tolerate that ok with just the short rise then I'd say it's the ingredients that are not in the artisan flour which cause the trouble - probably barley. In which case I'd say you likely do have a classic allergy to it.

Re: the green onions: yes, they are 'ok' - having low levels of fructose - for many hfi'ers, but DD's tolerance is only 9mg fructose per day at this point, so they are still way out of her price range, so to speak. I sure hope her tolerance improves! I'm not even able to try her on herbs at this point.

I don't know anything about fructan breakdown in grinding, but I do know that ground products expose more of their surface area to fermentation by bacteria. given that bacterial fermentation is the principal problem (with the fructans, that is) in fructose malabsorption, I think you may very well find that this is what you have. a simple test of the theory might be to try taking a (dairy free) probiotic sometime. what happens? if you have no changes whatsoever - or a mild improvement - say like a little less constipation or bloating would be an example of a mild improvement - then that's not entirely useful information clinically. BUT - if you had a bad reaction (diarrhoea or nausea would be common), or on the other hand if it made you feel like a whole new person - then I'd say that flora re-balancing is probably key for your healing, and it may be fructose malabsorption (which I think responds well to flora rebalancing too).

If you had no change or only mild improvement it may still be what you need, but you can't tell either way. a perfectly normal person with good flora will have not much change - but so can some people with terrible flora problems.

we're all individuals aren't we!

[urmensch]

Nicoleh,

The contact allergy must indeed be an immune response. I have tried several times to be tested for
this, but the clinics claim the test for grasses gives too many false positives. But there is no doubt about
the allergy even though there is a 2-3 day delay between exposure and a skin rash. But of course that
contact is with the outer layer of the grasses, and the cell walls of grasses are built from longer chain
fructans unlike most plants where the cellulose is built from starch (glucose polymers). I have a damaged
small intestine (given six weeks to live 66 years ago), so I have lots of malabsorption problems, but also
an allergic reaction to (apparently) fructans and fructose.

Now the wheat grains have less of this by the time they are ground into refined flour. There is still
a little bit, but not much. I remember 0.7 grams per hundred grams. Hopefully what remains
are broken down by grinding and fermentation or pass right through me.

I do get a reaction to unfermented wheat flour. That is why I have to dust my loaves with potato
flour. Maybe not so much any more, but my first two loaves I used an incredible amount of flour
for dusting, and I did get a reaction. If I cut back the water to 60 percent hydration, the dough is
not so sticky, and there is little need for extra flour during kneading.

I am aware that some hard aged cheeses might not be OK. The one I am using is labeled
"lactose free", and it seems to be safe. There are actually two forms of galactosemia. The
one diagnosed in infancy is fatal if not treated, but there is another benign form that is
*thought* to have no symptoms. I don't think diabetes would be recognized
as a symptom here.

I thought the galactose pathway was longer; I will have to do more reading on that. It also
turns out that the FDA allows a certain amount of fructose to be added to milk *without*
any indication on the label. Then there is the fact that I also have trouble with beans which
also contain galactose. Casein is a possibility, but I don't think it would be fermented
out. I can also try yoghurt if I can find a source that is guaranteed fructose free. I might
have to buy raw milk and ferment it myself.

Yes it seems that I do not need gluten free. The removal of sugars seems to be sufficient.
That is what is so amazing. If it were not for this forum, I would never have tried baking
bread that way. I don't add barley or sugar, but the major brand of all purpose flour I
tried lists barley malt as an ingredient.

I think my tolerance is around 500 mg per day. Nine milligrams must be horrific.

I have tried several different probiotics a few years back. I never noticed any change,
but the home made sauerkraut that I began making a few months back seems to help
a lot.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses.


I looked at them carefully and participated in celiac forums and events for a while. I opted
not to be tested, because I did not trust the accuracy of the tests. They all have error rates
of ten percent or more, and other allergies besides gluten can cause the characteristic
flat villi. Milk and soy allergy are also known to cause this, and there may be other
foods as well.

[nicoleh]

HI Urmensch,
I totally agree that the biopsy for coeliac disease isn't specific enough. I would rely more on the dna test that they can do now, though it does have high rates of false negatives, I think false positives not so much, but I'm not really sure.

With the yoghurt, if you want to make absolutely sure that there's no sugars left you need to do it yourself and ferment for 24 hours, no less. If you search for GAPS yoghurt or SCD yoghurt you'll find instructions to make sure you get it sugar free. GAPS and SCD are 2 diets that allow no lactose, amongst other things.

I could be wrong about the galactose, just from memory I was certain it was only a GDP enzyme before it was glucose.

I didn't know beans had galactose in them! and I certainly didn't know that the FDA allowed things to be added to milk without declaring it! where did you find that out? it's horrific! I'm glad I get good certified raw milk straight from the farm - I'm happy that it's not a bacterial risk - *disclaimer* - I'm not advising this. stupid legalities. anyway...

casein is changed a little by the fermentation process of bacteria, much as gluten can be. however it's often not enough for someone with a severe problem to help them. A test for casein reactivity is to make your own yoghurt, then hang it in cheese cloth for 24 hours over a bowl. the liquid that drips out should be strained again through very very fine cheesecloth or muslin or even silk. then it should be pure whey which is almost completely casein free. My DD was allergic to casein and she tolerated this whey ok. I know of a few other cases. if you tolerate that, but not the yoghurt itself, it's probably casein that bothers you - though it would be unusual for you to tolerate hard cheeses - if you had a mild reaction to casein, it may be ok as it's degraded a bit in the cheesemaking process. a severe intolerance probably no.

isn't this all such fun! (not).

yes, 9mg is hard. we've just discovered that she doesn't even tolerate the traces of fructose in olive oil! but we can't test her on any new fat to replace it right now (ghee is the only option left to us, other than home-rendered dripping) because she has an intestinal virus and bad diarrhoea - not time to test a new food. hoping that will clear up very soon!

I'm really looking forward to this being over!

[urmensch]

Hi Nicoleh

I've been busy. My high-end Kitchenaid mixer died in the middle of baking. This is the
second time. When I bought it new it only lasted a week before the gears went out.
They sent me a new one, but it took some time. Now three years later the same thing.
And for more than a year I wasn't using it at all. So I've been researching various
options. There are better mixers, but they are even more expensive. So I took it
apart, and it looks like I can fix it myself.

I think there is no doubt now that my problem is fructose -- even if the symptoms are
not quite the expected ones. HFI on top of diabetes that causes roller coaster BGs
that would be dangerous if I were taking insulin. Gluten was only a blind alley.
Nearly everything with wheat contains either sugar or barley malt. Barley malt
contains enzymes that convert starch (and probably fructans) into sugar: that
is why they add it. Read the ingredients on a sack of plain flour, and barley
malt is almost always there. It is the obvious problems with fresh fruit like apples and
grapes that would have given it away had I known about HFI.

Thanks for the tips about yoghurt. It looks like I will have to make my own. I could
eat it with limes and possibly some other fruits cooked to reduce the fructose. It is also
good for salad dressings.

I spent some time reading up on galactose. Converting to glucose is a four-step
process called the Leloir Process. Then when you are done you have phosphylated
glucose; this cannot leave the liver. So it is converted into glycogen which can be
dumped in moments of stress, or it can be converted into lipids and stored as
fat. The latter pathway leads directly to fatty liver, insulin resistance and type II
diabetes. Alcohol, fructose and galactose all lead to fatty liver like this. That
is where my problem is. I don't think this is completely understood yet, but
some useful information is here:

www.thelivercarefoundation.org/?page=galac

Apparently garbanzo beans are the very wost for galactose, but all beans
contain galactans which can be digested into sugars by intestinal flora.
This is what makes them "musical."

The news about fructose in milk comes from Dr. Mercola's site. You should
be able to do a search there and decide for yourself how credible this is. Mercola
is a fan of raw milk, but I am not. I had relatives die from tuberculosis that came
from a sick cow. Yet it might be necessary to use raw milk to obtain milk that
does not contain any fructose. The labeling deficiencies are so frustrating.

I found I have trouble with nearly all oils. I can tolerate one tablespoon of
olive oil in salad dressing, and that is it. For cooking I use coconut oil;
that seems to be OK. I keep the amount of oil down by always adding
water and doing a stir fry.

I guess my next experiment will be sourdough bread. I will have to wait
for a part for my mixer.

[nicoleh]

Hi Urmensch,
these days any certified dairy will have very strict testing for tuberculosis etc in their cattle. Oftentimes, the cow wasn't the source of the contamination anyway - open milking systems in which infected people coughed (by accident, presumably) let tuberculosis organisms get into the milk where they can multiply. This was documented on a number of occasions. Sorry to hear that it affected some of your family.

I think if you can tolerate cooked fruit then it must be a fat-type problem that you have with oil or something - do you think? (as opposed to fructose contamination). I do think it's fructose for DD in this olive oil but I'm not certain yet - no time to trial it right now. she's ended up being fine on ghee, once her virus was done. coconut oil is also saturated like ghee - only palm oil has a similar amount of saturation - all the other oils are poly or monounsaturates - significantly more prone to rancidity.

anyway, off to read the mercola article, thanks!