One of the most difficult things for people newly diagnosed with celiac disease to deal with is the abrupt changes in diet this diagnosis entails. Many people look at the list of forbidden foods and wonder what they can eat, not realizing that for most foods on that list there is an acceptable substitute that can either be purchased or made.  We live in a highly industrialized society and for those that are used to eating processed foods for the majority of their meal this change may come as a much bigger shock, but even some food manufactures are getting current by providing substitutes for your favorite foods.

The real key though is learning to cook those things that you may have thought you could never have again. There are many cookbooks on the market and thousands of recipes on the Internet by those that have traveled this road before you and have learned to cook appetizing foods from alternative grains that do not sacrifice of flavor.

Really the hardest part of the whole dietary change is learning how to use alternative flours and what works best for each application. While wheat is a good all purpose flour that can be used in most anything, each alternative flour that work better for certain types of cooking or baking. For most baking applications a combination of flours works best.

Be sure that your flours come from a gluten free source, even flours that are supposed to be gluten free, can be cross contaminated if they are not milled on dedicated machinery.

For thickening sauces you can use a variety of different flours such as cornstarch, rice flour, arrowroot flour, and potato flour or starch. For baking you will need a combination of several flours, and there are many different combinations, there are recipes you can do yourself and commercial preparations that you can buy off the shelf. Most combinations will include some sort of rice flour, possibly soy flour, cornstarch, and bean flour, which while it has a nice light texture should be used with a either brown sugar or maple sugar to cut the bitter taste of the beans.

Sorghum is an excellent flour that is gaining in popularity as it works well in bean mixtures and cuts the bitter flavor of those flours. Nut flours are good in small portions because they impart a nice flavor and speed up the rise time.

To substitute for the gluten that these flours do not contain, there is guar gum and xanthan gum which can be substituted for each other if you are allergic to the corn in the xanthan gum. These two products are binders that do the job of gluten by holding things together.

These days the alternatives to wheat flour are many and tasty, and it is no longer as big a sacrifice to forgo everything with gluten.