I love bread.
I was diagnosed with celiac recently enough that I can remember bread — real bread, made with wheat flour and, well, gluten — and I spend more time than I should thinking about the sandwiches I can’t eat anymore. When Meaghan asked me if I had any sandwiches to suggest for the upcoming Food Issue, I had a longer list than many of my gluten-eating co-workers. While I can’t eat the sandwiches, I certainly do have some spectacular bread-related fantasies.
Some people have sex dreams, and while I’m not saying I don’t, I am saying I have almost-pornographic dreams about eating sandwiches. Seriously. There’s this one dream where I’m sitting at a table with a cheese steak from Siri’s Gourmet Burgers & Pizza. I pick up the hoagie, so I can feel how soft it is against my fingers, and I just hold it for a moment, cradling it in my hand. I place the sandwich to my nose and take a deep smell, the cologne of the bread making me a little dizzy. I put it to my mouth and hold the bread on my tongue for a moment, tasting it tentatively, then more aggressively as I let my tongue explore the way it feels in my mouth. I use my teeth to pull away a little bread at a time, rolling the crumbs around in my mouth as I savor each one. I can feel the slow pull of the bread as my teeth tear away more of hoagie, the way the dough feels between my fingers. And then, all of a sudden, I remember — this is forbidden. I swallow, guilty, and wake up feeling like I’ve cheated on my fiancé.
Now you know what celiacs dream about. I’ve found great substitutes for pasta (Barilla corn, or the brown-rice stuff from Trader Joe’s). I don’t really miss pancakes and can have a Tate’s cookie if I need one. But bread — the soft, chewy kind of PB&Js and the hard French variety for eating with feta and smoked meat — that’s where my soul feels empty.
I’ve spent a lot of time since January, and gained a lot of weight, looking for good sandwich bread. Story Brooke Craft Coffee Bar has a good sandwich, whose bread isn’t too dense (the shop also has a good gluten-free doughnut selection, but that’s a topic for another day). In terms of finding bread for sandwiches, though, our grocery store offerings make me sad.
For me, the closest I can come is Glutino white bread (the only good thing about not eating real bread is I don’t see any reason to suffer through whole-wheat “bread” and pretend I don’t hate it anymore, since, you know, it isn’t really bread). I think my problem is that I miss real bread, and no matter what lies I tell myself, my dreams tell the truth: I miss bread made with flour.
So, if anyone out there has a magnificent gluten-free sandwich bread recipe, please email it to me. Because, honestly, it’s awkward answering my fiancé’s questions when I wake up some mornings.
Email CL A&E Editor Cathy Salustri at cathy.salustri@cltampa.com.
This article appears in Jun 15-22, 2017.