The Happy Consequences Of A Gastroscopy

A few weeks ago I've had the first batch of some medical examinations, not the least fun of which included swallowing about 85 km of rubber tube that ended with a webcam, power light and the most delightful set of biopsy pinchers. With no anaesthesia, of course, since we're Romanians, not whiny Americans who can't bear having the Aliens act performed on them with no stuntmen.

After filming a short documentary about my innards in Technicolor, the doctor insisted on keeping some memories (in the form of biopsies) for himself, and further instructed me to puke out the fire hose, to be thereafter inserted into the next patient.

The immediate outcome of this feat was the discovery that I seem to suffer from the Coeliac disease. This is much more preferrable than cancer, but it does involve giving up all food that contains gluten, for the rest of my life.

Gluten is made of a couple of proteins which are typically found in the likes of wheat. That means I can't eat regular bread, cookies, pizza, biscuits, noodles or touch "The Catcher In the Rye" -- something for which I'm actually quite grateful.

However, life exists without gluten, and websites and stores abound to sell us gluten-free flour and gluten-free ready-made products -- mostly replacing wheat with rice. (Yes, about two billion people on this planet have never seen bread and they're doing just fine, probably outliving you and me.)

That brings me to the secondary outcome, which is that my wife and I invested today in a home bread-maker.


This is an electric device which will take some ingredients, swirl them around rather a lot, and then cook up the concoction (pun intended) into something hopefully warmly edible.



The one we chose has "gluten-free bread" among its menu choices, and it can also make baguettes, by employing some suitably pornographic trays.

We therefore proceeded to look up recipes for gluten-free bread, only to be scared away by things like "Xanthan gum", "Ener-G egg replacer" or "Crisco shortening". Or vinegar.

So we simply took the recipe for regular bread -- which came with the bread-maker, and merely replaced wheat flour with rice flour. (We also replaced white sugar with brown sugar, and milk powder with its soy counterpart.)

Then we deposited the ingredients into the belly of the machine, and set it loose.


2.5 hours later the smell was quite enjoyable, and the porthole displayed something almost completely -- but not entirely -- unlike any bread we'd ever seen. Still it was smelling friendly, so we pried it out and cut it.








The inside of the bun looked a steamy light yellow -- quite puffy and uniform, not gooey but still very soft.



It tasted great. We abandoned the rest of the meal -- which my wife had prepared in case our bread experiment went wrong and left us starving -- and ate the bread with a bit of cheese, tomatoes and onions.



You can program these machines so they'll finish the bread for you by the time you wake up, which sounds like a great idea as long as it doesn't set the kitchen on fire.

So, the bad news is, if you and I ever go out together, I can't have pizza. The good news is, from now on I'm eating my own bread, and it's GOOD!

Complete set of pictures: here.