One of the things that our mum misses most about being gluten intolerant is bread, especially as a vehicle for cheese. Initially we bought oat crackers, but they are so expensive! So we decided to make our own. 500g of crackers makes enough for a week’s worth of lunches. They are best fresh but keep fairly well in a tin.
These are not as easy as pastry to roll out, so flour the work surface thoroughly. We used gram flour because you can buy it in huge bags and it is cheap. Don’t try to roll out all the dough at once, but roll it out a handful at a time. The oats soak up a lot of water and the dough may become dry before you finish rolling it all out. If this happens, just add a tiny bit of water to the dough.
A nice shortcut is instead of melting the butter in a pan (more stuff to wash up, more energy used), put the butter in an oven proof bowl/ramekin and put it in the heating oven as the first step.
You could add spices, pepper, herbs etc for variety. I would start with a teaspoon and adjust to taste. We have also successfully substituted 1/3 of the oats for gram flour, which made it a bit more biscuit-like and different, but also very tasty.
Lastly, a quick note. Oats are naturally gluten free but are not necessarily processed in a gluten free environment. Get ones that say gluten free if you are gluten intolerant.
Ingredients
500g oats
¾ tsp of salt
50g melted butter
500ml of boiling water approx
- Grind 2/3 of the oats into a fine powder using a blender.
- Mix the oats and salt together.
- Add the melted butter and mix.
- Add enough water to make a slightly sticky dough.
- Dust the work surface with a gluten free flour of your choice, and roll out the dough.
- Cut out squares of dough and place them on a lined baking sheet.
- Bake in a preheated oven at 150C for 30 minutes. They are done when they are dry and hard to touch and slightly golden. They will shrink quite a bit when baking.
The Two Sisters' Kitchen 