If you or someone in your family has recently been diagnosed with celiac disease then one of the decisions you will need to face is whether to make your home completely gluten free, or simply to make the necessary adjustments for the celiac individual in your home. Since cross contamination is an important issue for those with celiac disease it is often easier to simply make your kitchen a dedicated gluten free zone.

Your first step in creating a dedicated gluten free kitchen is to clean all the gluten free foods out of your cupboards. Educate yourself first as to the sources of hidden gluten and then read every label. If you are unsure about a food item, get rid of it, it is not worth the risk of getting sick.

Give all your unopened gluten products to friends or the local food bank, and toss any open items in the trash. Repeat this step with your freezer and refrigerator. Dispose of all open condiments that might have been in contact with gluten, such as mayonnaise, or jam.

It is a good idea to give your kitchen a thorough cleaning at this point, since flour tends to spill or get in the air then settle on surfaces, and bread crumbs can hide in the smallest of places. It only takes a very small amount of gluten to make a celiac individual sick. Be sure to wipe everything down; cupboards, appliances, counters, refrigerators and freezers.

You will need to go thru all of your food preparation equipment; this can be a very costly task so you may need to take this one in stages. All wooden and other porous utensils should be replaced, so should anything that cannot be thoroughly washed, an example might be a knife with food particles pushed up into the handle.

Appliances such as mixers and toasters should be replaced since you will never get all the flour particles out of them no matter how hard you try. All cutting boards should also be replaced unless they are marble, and all pots and pans with no stick surfaces that are scratched should be not be used since food particles can get stuck in those scratches.

If in doubt about anything simply get rid of it, it is better to do that than to have you or your family member get persistently sick because of a small amount of contamination.