Not helpful

[jeliza]

We've reached the first challenge day in gluten elimination diet land, and it has been such a mess. You do your first challenge with something like barley or rye, since they have gluten, and then if that goes okay, after three or four days you do wheat (it's very common to have a wheat allergy without a gluten intolerance, and it does widen your eating options if you can just cut out wheat and not gluten)

In a rather more dramatic result than expected, the kids threw up. Not from the gluten, but because apparently there is no way I can cook barley that their super texture sensitive mouths can deal with. (I thought it was acceptable but boring in pseudo-oatmeal form, and weird but grew on me in "risotto" form. Kind of like boba. No place around here sells rye bread that isn't actually rye + wheat, or I would have just gotten that.)

So... for them we're just gonna go ahead and have some regular old bread tomorrow and if it goes badly, stick to full gluten free and not try to see if it is just wheat.  Of course, neither of them have been feeling particularly well since we started this dang thing anyway, so ... yeah. Sean has noticed significant changes, I have seen a few minor improvements  that may or may not be from the absence of gluten and also I don't know that they would be worth giving up my bread for.

Comments

[eub]

I don't know if this texture would work but it's a different texture -- non-pearled barley cooks to separate grains, toothy, rather than the way pearled barley's starch comes out and makes a gooey mass. Of course they may reasonably not want to look at any barley of whatever kind.

[shadesofmauve]

How big of a test do you need?

...can you feed them small amounts of beer?

(I mostly mean this to be silly, but with gluten intolerance small amounts work, and a mouthful never hurt a kid, so...)

[pie]

You can get barley flour. I had some slightly sweet barley flour dumplings at a Tibetan restaurant once that I still think about, they were just perfectly subtly amazing.