#106 – Gluten Free Ancestral Eating

Combining gluten-free eating with ancestral eating need not be daunting. Today Alison talks with Rebecca Zipp, a beloved podcast guest and supporter. She’s been gluten-free for the last 16 years – bringing her husband and her children along with her. In addition, for most of last year Alison ate gluten-free. Between the two of them, there’s a lot to talk about!

In this episode, we cover:

• Why Rebecca went gluten-free and the impact it’s had on her.
• Examples of gluten-free breakfasts lunches and dinners.
• The mass of gluten-free carbohydrate options, and how we use them
• The basics of gluten-free breadmaking

…and Rebecca finishes the episode giving words of wisdom from her 16 years of gluten-free eating.

And remember, gluten doesn’t necessarily have to be an all or nothing: making one of your meals a day gluten-free or several days a week gluten-free or going gluten-free for a short space of time can make a big difference to digestion. So even if you don’t have to avoid gluten all the time the things we talk about in this episode will help lighten, change up and inspire your kitchen.

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One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

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To enter our liver capsule giveaway (US only), sign up for our newsletter at ancestralkitchenpodcast.com (at the top of any page) and One Earth Health’s newsletter at oneearthhealth.com (after a few moments on the site a popup will appear). Competition open until close of day, May 13 2025.

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Rebecca’s monthly meal plans

Rebecca’s Teaching Cooking with Nourishing Traditions

Alison’s Millet and Sorghum bread recipe

Alison’s How to make a Gluten-Free Soudough Starter

Alison’s Traditional Oatcakes recipe

Alison’s Sourdough Oatcakes recipe

Alison’s Fermented Oat Bake recipe

Alison’s Millet Polenta video

Alison’s Millet Polenta Bread video

Rebecca’s first episode is #83 – Meal Planning and Ancestral Food Rhythms. It has a two recipe download for supporters that can be accessed via our website: Sausage & Potato Casserole and Baked Apple Oatmeal

The millet episode is #81 – Millet: How to Use this Sustainable, Gluten & Lectin-Free Grain

Rebecca uses this website: https://nourishingmeals.com

Rebecca’s favourite Blender Oat Pancake recipe

 

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Transcript:

Alison:
Combining gluten-free eating with ancestral eating need not be daunting. Today I talk with Rebecca Zipp, a beloved podcast guest and supporter. She’s been gluten-free for the last 16 years, bringing her husband and her children along with her. In addition, for most of the last year I ate gluten-free. Between the two of us, we’ve got a lot to talk about. In this episode, we cover why Rebecca went gluten-free and the impact it’s had on her. Examples of gluten-free breakfasts, lunches and dinners The mass of gluten-free carbohydrate options and how we use them The basics of gluten-free bread making And Rebecca finishes the episode giving words of wisdom from her 16 years of gluten-free eating, And remember, gluten doesn’t necessarily have to be an all or nothing Making one of your meals a day gluten-free or several days a week gluten-free or going gluten-free for a short space of time can make a big difference to our health journeys and digestion. So even if you don’t have to avoid gluten all the time, the things we talk about in this episode will help lighten, change up and inspire your kitchen.

Rebecca:
Welcome to the ancestral kitchen podcast

Alison:
I’m allison a european town dweller living in england and.

Rebecca:
I’m andrea living on a family farm in northwest washington state usa

Alison:
Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking and living with ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
Music

Alison:
Hello and welcome back to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. For this episode, I am delighted to welcome back to the podcast because she’s been on with us before, Rebecca from ahumbleplace.com. Thank you for coming on, Rebecca.

Rebecca:
Thank you for having me again. I’m so honoured to be here again.

Alison:
Wonderful. So Rebecca was on our meal planning episode, which was number 83. We’re going to talk a little bit about meal planning this episode but that episode 83 dives much more deeply into it and Rebecca is an absolute whiz with meal planning so do go back and listen to that if you haven’t yet Rebecca is um also a patron of the podcast and has her own site humbleplace.com where she talks about homeschooling in the Charlotte Mason style which if you’ve listen to us for a while you will know that um particularly Andrea talks about a lot so um what’s the last thing you ate Rebecca tell me about that.

Rebecca:
Okay well I love this part of your show um because it’s just always so interesting to see what you guys eat it gives me inspiration um I just had breakfast a little bit ago this morning here and my husband made a big batch of pancakes this weekend um we soak the oats overnight and then um he makes them in a blender and cooks them that way and we had leftovers because my son and I were gone on a retreat this weekend and so we had some of those leftover with um butter and maple syrup and then we also had so

Alison:
Were the pancakes cooked and was the mix leftover.

Rebecca:
Oh no the the pancakes were cooked so I just reheated them in the toaster oven. Um yeah very very simple and then we had uh scrambled eggs in bacon grease leftover bacon grease and then um some homemade kefir and now i’m drinking some um i’ve been working on some liver detoxing so i’m drinking some dandelion root tea okay

Alison:
So that’s that i’ve had dandelion coffee what’s the difference so just the way they prepare it whether it’s a coffee or a tea i guess is it.

Rebecca:
I’m not sure usually i have um just a straight up dandelion dried dandelion root tea but um i get them i get it from azure but they’ve been out so i got some roasted dandelion root and that tastes more like coffee so i’m wondering if that’s the difference yeah

Alison:
I i think you’re right i think they roast the root and maybe for the coffee version they roast it quite dark you know like coffee would be whereas the tea’s not roasted i wanted to go back and talk about the pancakes for a moment you said oats are in them what else.

Rebecca:
Um it’s oats banana I actually um can share the recipe with you if you’d like the only modification I’ve made is it’s I got it from a website I can’t remember the the name of it but um the only modification I’ve made is again that we soak the oats overnight um in water with a little bit of kefir um but it’s maple syrup banana my daughter can’t have egg whites so we just put egg yolks in it um cinnamon maple syrup um a few other things like I said my husband makes it so I’m not 100 sure what’s in it but it’s very simple ingredients

Alison:
Nice does it hold together all right without the egg white.

Rebecca:
Yeah yeah very well yeah surprisingly um we’ve had to experiment quite a bit with that just because of her egg white allergy and for the most part we find that things most things do well i mean it’s they sometimes are a little bit more dense than they would be otherwise but um they still taste good yeah

Alison:
I agree i mean there’s a recipe in our cookbook for staffordshire oat cakes and those are a pancake sound quite similar to you know what you’ve had this morning but those are just oats water and a bit of salt there’s no need for an egg in there to bind it with oats you can do that quite easily they’re not perhaps as as elastic as other pancakes might be a little bit more brittle but they’re still they’re still nice pancakes and good you just don’t need the egg at all.

Rebecca:
Right these are these are pretty thin um they’re not like you know the nice big fluffy pancakes that you normally see but it works well for us

Alison:
Yeah, I think that’s the kind of difference between American pancakes, which when we think of that, and probably maybe just in America, that’s what you think of as pancakes, they’re big and fluffy. Whereas in Europe, a kind of a crepe style, like a French crepe, or the pancakes we’re a bit more used to over here aren’t big and fluffy like the American pancakes. We’re used to them being thinner as well.

Rebecca:
Yeah, I would say that they’re more crepe-like than, like, I think the traditional idea here is that we have like lumberjack. Pancakes with a stack of 15 that’s like a foot high or whatever they’re not like that so they’re very european i guess

Alison:
Yeah when we um when we came back to england in the summer rob and i went to a restaurant near borough market which is a famous foodie market in london and we had breakfast and rob had pancakes and it was like that it wasn’t 15 foot high but it was very high this stack and he he couldn’t get through it all there were two yeah they’re.

Rebecca:
Very friendly they

Alison:
Were like that thing yeah cool okay and.

Rebecca:
What about you what did you have

Alison:
Yeah so we we had lunch because it’s later in the afternoon for me here um just like when i’m recording with andrea we had sausages um from the market farmer at the market does amazing sausages with no um breadcrumbs in them just meat salt and pepper and we had them with cabbage um which i made sauerkraut this morning but the cabbage was a bit too big so I saved a quarter it’s a huge cabbage um and chopped it in the same way then put that in the cast iron pan with the sausages and Gabriel turned the sausages over and then I noticed at the end the cabbage had shrunk down so much you know just in the 30 minutes it had been in the pan that um there wasn’t so many vegetables so I heated and stole some frozen peas from the freezer.

Rebecca:
I don’t think that’s cheating.

Alison:
It was actually nice, the pea with the cabbage and the sausage went really well. We had that with a bread that Rob made when I was away this weekend. Is quite an impressive thing. He’s slowly learning to make different sourdough breads himself without me around. Okay. And it was about 75% rye and 25% this new wheat, which I’ve been talking about and trying, which is a heritage wheat grain, which is a byproduct from the thatch. And Rob, although he can’t eat standard wheat, seems to be okay so far with this wheat. is.

Rebecca:
That is that what you were talking about in your recent newsletter that

Alison:
Okay yeah it’s that exact grain and we just we tried it and i and i thought rob wasn’t going to be okay with it i thought this isn’t going to work so far he’s been okay we’ve only done 25 in recipes so far okay i want this weekend to make a pizza with 100 okay you know that sounds good so we’ll see how he is with that it’s really it’s really tasty and it comes from such a an amazing farm yeah that i’d be really happy if he can eat it no yeah just to support them it’s a good thing right.

Rebecca:
That would check all the boxes that you would be supporting someone locally and you know them and that he can he can tolerate it

Alison:
Yeah exactly so fingers crossed yeah okay um let’s dive into today’s topic we’re going to be talking about eating ancestrally gluten-free today and i just wanted to before we um dive into you because you’ve been eating gluten-free for a long long time which is why I wanted you on here. I wanted to talk about why, because I think, you know, when you see the terms gluten-free, a lot of us think, oh, well, I’m not gluten-free. That’s kind of not relevant to me. I can eat gluten. But I think that there are a lot of reasons why people might want to eat gluten-free. So it might be, first of all, that, you know, you’re celiac or you have a serious health issue that you’re working through and you want to cut gluten out of the equation. We’ll stop.

Alison:
It might be because you’re experimenting with your health. You think maybe you have some intolerances. You’re not quite sure. You’re not sure what gluten does for you. And you just want to play around a bit and see what happens if you take gluten out. It might also be because you just want a break. And, you know, that might be for a day, a week, you know, because you feel like you’re kind of been a bit heavy. But it might also be just for one meal in a day. You know, I feel like eating gluten grains three meals a day can be quite heavy. And so taking one or two meals a day and saying, you know what, I’m not going to eat gluten at these meals. I’m just going to eat gluten for my lunch, for example, can feel really good because it’s lighter on your digestion. And as a way to kind of maintain eating grains without feeling too heavy, I think it’s a really positive thing.

Alison:
So for um 80 of the last year i’ve been eating gluten-free as well and people have always asked us on the the podcast to do a gluten-free episode so that’s why we’re here and um rebecca how long have you been eating gluten-free um.

Rebecca:
I was tested in may of 2009 and found to have a gluten sensitivity so since May of 2009 so close to 16 years yep

Alison:
Cool okay okay so let’s just swap to a break and then we’ll come back and dive into your story a bit more okay, Okay. So can you explain, you said you had a test done. Can you explain a little bit more about how that came about and then why you chose after that to go gluten-free?

Rebecca:
Yeah, I was seeing an MD at the time who was also very holistic and very interested, learning on her own about how food can be healing. And so we did some blood tests and it was discovered that I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.

Rebecca:
And she wanted to, before I looked at Synthroid or anything like that, she wanted to see if maybe eliminating gluten would help. And she had seen some good results with some of her other patients. And I also got a test. the test was done as well, just to kind of confirm it. I wasn’t over the top. I didn’t have celiac or anything like that. But it did show that I had some of the antibodies that show up when you have a gluten sensitivity. So we decided to just experiment with it a little bit. And so at that point, I was getting blood tests every three months for my thyroid just to see what it was doing. And there was significant improvement after I eliminated gluten. And she wanted me to try and take it a step further. So I ended up going grain-free for a while and that got me all the way to where she wanted me to be. And I’m not currently grain-free. I have some grains, as I said, I had oats with my breakfast, but I don’t eat a whole lot of grains and my thyroid is still performing very well. So it made a huge difference in that area.

Alison:
Onimotose is an autoimmune disease, isn’t it?

Rebecca:
Yes.

Alison:
Okay. And do you know why that developed? Is that kind of a genetic thing? Do you know anything else about that?

Rebecca:
I’m not really sure. It could have been… It could have been genetic. I honestly don’t know if it runs in my family. I know that they’ve had other problems, other types of autoimmune issues. But I think just our day and age, I grew up eating standard American diet. It was just my dad and me. I ate a lot of microwave meals and canned things and really not smart things. And that was until I was into my late 20s. And so I don’t, I certainly don’t think that was doing me any favors eating that way.

Alison:
No, I can understand. So how did it go from just you kind of making that decision to the whole family? Did you just, did all of you go gluten free at the same time? How did your husband feel and what happened with the kids?

Rebecca:
Well, at the time it was just my husband and I, we didn’t have any kids yet. Um, he also got a test and had, um, sensitivity or showed that he had sensitivity as well. Although his was even less than mine. Um, but we just decided just for, to make things easier that we would just go, go gluten-free. I mean, I do the majority of the cooking in our home. Um, and so to have, you know, separate meals or separate sides. And at the time I wasn’t really, I didn’t know anything about ancestral eating or anything like that and so my first reaction was just you know look for all the gluten-free labeled stuff in the grocery store and then to have to buy separate versions of that for everything seemed kind of silly and to cook it so we just made everything the same and he is still gluten-free mostly but I mean sometimes he isn’t so yeah

Alison:
So have your kids always been gluten-free then since the beginning.

Rebecca:
Yes yeah okay

Alison:
And And what happens when they go out or when you go out or when they go out on their own, you know, and they’re at parties or something like that? What happens there?

Rebecca:
Usually, the people who, if we go to someone’s house for a party or anything like that, they are very kind and accommodate that, that we’re gluten-free. A lot of our friends are actually already gluten-free, which makes it easier for us. Or we just avoid things or we bring our own things.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. How old are your children now?

Rebecca:
My oldest is 14 and my youngest just turned 11. and

Alison:
So they know that they’re gluten-free and do they know why.

Rebecca:
Well we’ve talked about it with them just how we are you know gluten-free at home and why um their dad and i are gluten-free we’ve never had them tested so i don’t necessarily know if they need to be gluten-free but again just because of the fact that we show that sensitivity we’re just being safe than you know more safe than sorry um and then just focusing on grains that because i mean what we’ve learned is that the sacrifice of gluten really once you’ve been doing it this long or if they like as they’ve been doing their whole life it’s not really a huge sacrifice we just find alternatives that work for us yeah

Alison:
What’s the most challenging thing do you think in the time that you’ve been doing this about eating gluten-free?

Rebecca:
Sometimes I have a craving for something. You know, just I’ve had, and I know you’re going to talk about this, but I have had bad luck making gluten-free bread for myself that fulfills that craving. Yeah. And so, but it doesn’t happen very often. And then, of course, you know, if we do, we are eating out. We don’t eat out a whole lot, but when we’re traveling or, you know, just away from home, sometimes trying to find gluten-free options is challenging. Yeah.

Alison:
The bread thing is really interesting because, you know, when you’re in the middle of that craving, it feels like the worst thing in the world. And you just want that bread, but it passes. Yeah. And then, you know, you might go, in my experience when I was not eating gluten bread at all, if you get used to it, you can go for a long time without even be bothered. Right. And then it comes and gets you again. Yeah. But it passes again. So I can understand the thing about bread. And like you said, we will talk about that a bit later in the episode. So I just want to talk about your meal planning a bit more. I mentioned that you were in the early episode, 83. But your meal planning, to me, seems absolutely incredible. Can you explain how that in particular applies and helps you with the gluten-free?

Rebecca:
Um, well, you know, just being able to, I think it’s, it’s, it probably shows up more in like our sides. So a lot of times, um, gluten or wheat or, you know, grains show up in, in sides in a meal. So like rolls or, um, noodles, pasta, you know, that sort of thing. And so again just because i’ve been doing this for so long i know like if i am using a recipe that calls for like rice which we do have rice sometimes but not always or pasta or something like that i know that i can substitute something else for that and so that can show up in the meal plan um with that meal if that makes

Alison:
Sense yeah it does and um yeah i mean seriously if people want to know about Rebecca’s meal planning do go back to 83 she uses um an app which Andrea is now completely hooked on and loves she’s always talking about it on discord so do go back and listen to that and understand just how thorough and just amazing how you can just you plug all that stuff into there and then you know what you’re buying and you know what you’re doing and it’s just out of that part of your brain that’s having to hold things which I think is wonderful Yes.

Rebecca:
Automation is wonderful. Yeah.

Alison:
Okay, let’s go to another quick ad and then we will come back and talk about the meals that you eat.

Rebecca:
Okay.

Alison:
Okay, so can you, we’ll go through breakfast, lunch and evening meal. Can you talk about some examples to start with of what you eat for breakfast?

Rebecca:
We usually eat pretty much the same thing every day during the week. We’ll have some kind of oat thing usually. Sometimes I make soaked oat and buckwheat muffins, and I’ll make a batch of those and then freeze the ones that we don’t eat that morning. And those are soaked overnight in kefir.

Rebecca:
Um, sometimes I’ll just make oatmeal. Um, I think I told you once that oats are my love language. So, um, they, they are a big part of breakfast usually. Um, or we have something like, you know, what we had this morning, although this is usually rare. We don’t normally have leftover pancakes from the weekend. Um, but that’s usually what my husband makes. So my husband makes breakfast on the weekends and, um, sorry, I’ll go back along with the weekday meal. We have the, um, oats related item and then we’ll usually have scrambled eggs. My daughter will have either a, yet an egg yolk or two scrambled egg yolks, or I’d make her chicken sausage. Um, sometimes if chicken is available, it’s been hard to come by lately. Um, and then, uh, we’ll have either homemade yogurt or homemade kefir, depending on who’s consuming it because not everyone is a fan of kefir unfortunately okay um and then on the weekends when my husband makes breakfast he either makes the pancakes that i mentioned or we have another um apple oat apple i think i shared that in the other episode you did that again is yeah

Alison:
There’s a download just i’ll jump in for that episode 83 for patreons which has that baked apple dish that you’re talking about in it yeah for sure carry on.

Rebecca:
Yeah so we’ll have that and that’s again oats soaked in water and a little bit of either yogurt or kefir with apples um or we have another one that we’ve been we’ve been trying lately um it’s also oats with blueberries it’s like a blueberry oat blueberry coffee cake and then we’ll have bacon and eggs and yeah it’s It’s really good. So, I mean, it’s all similar. Usually eggs are our main protein. Yeah.

Alison:
But yeah, pretty simple. And do you cook it fresh every day?

Rebecca:
Yes. Yeah, I’ll make a dozen. And then, you know, we’ll have three that morning or whatever, however many of us happen to be eating. Sometimes my husband fasts. And then I’ll freeze the rest. And then we just reheat them in the toaster oven on the following mornings.

Alison:
Okay. And do you do that with the bakes? Do you make the bakes double the size and have leftovers? Or are you making those fresh each time?

Rebecca:
Usually those are fresh each time um except for the pancakes he’ll make a double batch of pancakes on saturday and then we’ll store half of it in the fridge and then just reheat it on sunday morning okay

Alison:
Nice okay so let’s move on to lunch give me some examples of what you’re eating gluten-free for lunch.

Rebecca:
Um usually it’s well not usually sometimes it’s leftovers if we have leftovers from the night before. Um, we’ll have, uh, sometimes like tuna. Um, let’s see, there’s, um, we’ll use the, there’s, uh, gluten-free or I’m sorry, almond flour tortillas that you can either make or buy. And we’ll use those as in place of, um, you know, regular tortillas and have some cheese melted in them or some ham. Usually I’ll buy a big slab of ham and then slice it and freeze the slices and then I can thaw them as I need them. Sometimes I make a butternut squash soup, which is very simple in the Instant Pot.

Rebecca:
Let’s see. It’s usually sort of Oh, sometimes we get summer sausage and make like sort of like a charcuterie board. We’ll have sliced summer sausage with some sliced raw cheese. And then every once in a while we’ll splurge on seed crackers, organic seed crackers, and have those. Usually, you know, we’ll have a ferment of some kind, sauerkraut or cortito or, you know, pickles or whatever I happen to have in the refrigerator or salsa. So it’s, it’s not really, I don’t have like a rotation for it or anything like that. It’s, it’s sort of what’s available. And then what can I make from what’s available?

Alison:
Okay. And then what about your evening meal?

Rebecca:
The evening meal is usually some kind of protein. So for the most part, that’s either beef, chicken, or fish, and sometimes pork. Every once in a while, we’ll have soaked beans or eggs. I guess we have a lot of different proteins now that I’m stating everything. And then we’ll have that with a vegetable side. So for instance, let’s see. Last night, we had a soup. So I made a bean soup. It was a cannellini bean soup with soaked beans in homemade chicken stock with tomatoes and kale and just some spices. So it was very simple. And then we had salad with that and then some crackers and milk. Very simple. So yeah I mean it’s I think the key for me is just keeping it simple and finding things that work for us and repeating those things yeah

Alison:
And that’s where the meal planning comes in you know just repeating repeating your children are at home because you’re homeschooling are they being involved in some of those meals any of those meals all of them in cooking.

Rebecca:
Yeah yeah we have it on our schedule that um my son helps me make supper on mondays and then my daughter helps me make supper on thursdays so just whatever we happen to be making that day they’ll be helping me in the kitchen shop and stir and things like that right

Alison:
So if people want to see um your meal plans you put them out in your newsletter which people can sign up to via or humbleplace.com and every time you send a newsletter you’ve got that meal plan in there they’re all up on your website in in really quite a lot of detail so you can click on them and see where you’ve got the recipe from and actually go and find the actual recipe so that’s a really helpful resource so if people are interested they should go and find out. Okay, let’s talk now about the kind of specific gluten-free carb options. So first of all, not even thinking about grains or pseudo grains, we’ve got root vegetables. So from the root vegetables category, I’m thinking potatoes, sweet potatoes, which you call yams. I’d be interested to know that Rebecca went and got a yam for her, which I call a sweet potato, and held it up on the camera for me because we.

Rebecca:
Needed to clarify because it is confusing

Alison:
Has it got yellow flesh has it got white flesh what is it anyway a sweet potato or a yam squash which you talked about your soup and parsnip swede which is rutabaga over in the states beetroot beet and celeriac um how often are you using root vegetables in your in your meal plan rotation do you eat them every day or is it just seasonal how does that work for you very.

Rebecca:
Often um usually that is i’ve found that to be a good replacement sometimes for grain so for instance um sometimes i make a beef stroganoff that is supposed to be served over like noodles or rice or something and i’ll just serve it over mashed potatoes okay and that works well for us and then of course for the other things you know it just depends on like if we’re in a csa what we get from our farmer so um you know usually it’s very simple just roasting those things and and things so we we have a wide variety potatoes are pretty much a staple in our house we have those pretty much year-round um also yams um but the other things are more more seasonal

Alison:
Yeah um the other recipe that’s in that download that patrons can get is a tray bake with i think sausage and potato in which is an example of you using potato this end we do roasted vegetables um during the kind of autumn and winter when they’re around we will do them just like you said really simply in the oven um just with maybe some lard and some spices or perhaps with olive oil and some herbs and just literally put them in the oven and cook them and then we’re eating them fresh that day when they’ve just been cooked but we also eat them afterwards so we put them in the fridge and then we’ll either have them cold the day after or sometimes I just reheat them in the cast iron pan with some some lard and we’ll eat those for two or three days. OK, so let’s move on now and talk about grains and pseudo grains that we might be able to use if we’re eating gluten free. So the first one that I always put first because I love it and it sounds like you do as well.

Rebecca:
I do.

Alison:
The first ones are oats. And, you know, most people think that oats are just porridge or oat milk now as well, obviously. But they’re so versatile. I mean, you’re using them in your kitchen for pancakes, which you’re just doing in the blender. And you’re using them for bakes, which are so versatile because you can make them savory or sweet. I’ve got recipes on my blog for oat cakes or sourdough oat cakes or oat bakes or fermented porridge or lots and lots of different dishes, which I will put in the show notes. So if people want to access those, they can. let’s talk a bit about rice because you said you don’t use it very much tell us what your choices are on rice what you have and why you don’t have it so much.

Rebecca:
We have um white basmati rice that’s the rice of choice for us um we don’t eat a lot of it just because we’ve gotten so used to over the years not um eating grains um aside from oats yeah that it’s just not part of our regular rotation, but there are certain dishes, like if I make a curry or tonight I’m just making salmon and we’re going to have rice with that. So I’ve got it soaking right now. It’s just not something that we have a whole lot, but occasionally it’s nice. My daughter really likes it.

Alison:
Why do you choose white, not brown?

Rebecca:
I have read that brown rice generally has a higher arsenic content and is more difficult to digest even if it’s soaked um and so we switched to white rice and when we first started eating weston a price way we were eating brown rice um and neither one of us really liked it um and when i started doing more research into it i i decided to switch

Alison:
Yeah we’re exactly the same so i used to eat brown rice and now we don’t have brown rice at all we just have white rice um for the reason that it seems that more traditional communities ate white rather than brown um I didn’t know about the arsenic thing but that’s really useful do you always soak your rice yes yeah okay and you just soak it overnight and you put vinegar in there or not.

Rebecca:
Sometimes I’ll soak it overnight if I remember the night before. Sometimes I’ll start it earlier in the morning if I know I can get, you know, a good six to eight hours of soaking time. And I’ll just soak it in water with a little bit of apple cider vinegar.

Alison:
Okay. And then how long does that take you to cook? It must be really quick with the soak.

Rebecca:
Yeah, I usually cook it in my Instant Pot. So it’s only about nine minutes.

Alison:
Wow. Okay. We haven’t, I think maybe Rob did rice once in the Instant Pot. We’ve just got the Instant Pot, not had it long. Okay. So we’re kind of getting used to it. And Rob absolutely loves it. He’s like, wow.

Rebecca:
It’s so convenient. He said to me,

Alison:
This is the first piece of kitchen equipment you’ve ever bought that makes my life easier.

Rebecca:
Yes, I guess all the rest probably added more work.

Alison:
Exactly. I’m just making him do more things with the other ones.

Rebecca:
Right, right.

Alison:
What I find fascinating about rice is it’s another one of those grains like wheat that has been super, super hybridized and crossbred to create high yield. And if you go back in time there are so many varieties of heritage rice that look different taste different smell different and yeah and you can really if you like rice you can play around with those so that’s quite an exciting thing it’s not you just have to eat right rice every meal you can try all these red rices and black rices and wild rices yeah.

Rebecca:
We do wild rice too

Alison:
That’s yum isn’t it I really like wild rice yes okay um millet again millet’s something that I mean it was never hybridized because it’s an ancient grain but there are so many varieties of it there are millets you know there are lots of different millets and we have a whole episode on millet which was number 81 I often make polenta with millet and that drink that I really like the fermented drink that I developed bosa is also millet so we millet a fair bit here do you use minute.

Rebecca:
I don’t know. I feel like I should. Andrea has been trying to convince me that I should. There’s a person in my family that doesn’t, is not a fan of millet. So I may work on it more though.

Alison:
Yeah. Maybe you should kind of work really hard to put it into something exciting, you know, like put a salad with lots of different veggies and some miso or something, to make it a bit different. Because on its own, particularly if we cook too much, And then we have leftovers. Rob will just eat it cold. But Gable’s like, oh, not cold millet again.

Rebecca:
Yes.

Alison:
So it can make a difference to, you know, just jazz it up a little bit rather than just having it by itself. How you prepare it, yeah. Yeah, exactly. The same for sorghum, really. When we were in Italy, we used sorghum a lot because sorghum was grown in Italy. I haven’t found it grown in this country. So we’re not using it so much. But that cooks up pretty much like rice does. And you can use that. Have you used sorghum, Rebecca?

Rebecca:
I have, yeah. I make some every once in a while. We don’t, again, another grain that we don’t have a whole lot of is corn. But every once in a while, I’ll make cornbread muffins and they have sorghum in them. And they’re very good.

Alison:
And do you buy sorghum flour for that or do you actually have the whole sorghum?

Rebecca:
I do buy the flour. Yeah, I don’t know that I’ve actually even looked into a resource for whole sorghum. But now you’ve got me thinking about that. Maybe I need to do that.

Alison:
Yeah, it’s a nice one to have as an alternative. You know, I mean, you don’t eat many grains anyway, but it’s sweet and it’s tasty and it’s got more bite to it because the grains are bigger than millet. So it feels a bit more satisfying, you know, when you’re eating it.

Rebecca:
Yeah.

Alison:
Okay, we’ve got teff, which isn’t a grain, it’s a pseudo grain, but in those famous kind of African pancakes, teff pancakes, we do have a video of Chef Aaron Goldstein doing wonderfully concentric circles in his cast iron pan with teff. Teff, amaranth, I tend to put teff, amaranth, buckwheat and quinoa sort of in the same category, or maybe just teff, amaranth and quinoa. Do you use quinoa?

Rebecca:
I don’t i can’t i can’t actually handle quinoa and i’m not sure why i’ve always i think there’s a digestive issue there um but it gives me a really bad stomach ache if it’s not rinsed extremely well because i think the saponins in it um irritate my stomach so we usually don’t have quinoa

Alison:
Yeah so if you soak quinoa everyone will know if they’ve tried soaking quinoa is if you leave it in the water the water goes so kind of bubbly and soapy and thick and then when you go to rinse it it takes eight or ten rinses to get all this stuff off those are the saponins and we we were off quinoa for ages and then we tried gable with it and he did not do well with it so at the moment we don’t eat quinoa at all but we do have buckwheat a lot do you use buckwheat there i do yeah we use buckwheat.

Rebecca:
In the muffins that i make yeah um our half oats half buckwheat

Alison:
Um.

Rebecca:
There’s, I have a few random recipes that call for buckwheat. Um, there’s a chocolate cake recipe, so we’ll have that for special occasions. Um, yeah. But that’s probably the pseudo-grain that I have the most experience with.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. We use it for pancakes. That’s my favorite use of buckwheat. And I’ve done it with either buckwheat flour, which I’m just mixing overnight with something like a kefir in it or some sourdough starter and water and then frying up in the cast iron pan in the morning. Or sometimes I will make pancakes with whole buckwheat grains. So I’ll soak the whole buckwheat grains and then I leave them really for two or three days, depending on how I’m organized. Sometimes I’ll just forget about them and they’re still fine. And then I rinse those, rinse them really well, because again, they’re a little bit soapy when you rinse them. And I will, sometimes I sprout them, which takes another couple of days. But sometimes I just put them straight in the food processor after they’ve been soaked with some water and blend them up. And then I use that mix to make pancakes. You can ferment that or you can make pancakes with it straight away. Kasher is one of our favorite recipes in the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, which is a buckwheat recipe. Have you tried the kasher?

Rebecca:
I haven’t, but I wanted to because I think you talked about it in one of your episodes about your favorite recipes from Nourishing Traditions.

Alison:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Rebecca:
Yeah. And I was inspired to, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Alison:
So the only problem is it’s got eggs in.

Rebecca:
Well, I mean, the rest of us can have eggs. so there’ll

Alison:
Be three of you eating it and one not right um and then chickpea um flour have you ever worked with that.

Rebecca:
I’ve never made anything with it um actually no I take that back well it was it was soaked chickpea so I don’t know if it’s the same thing probably not um I made muffins once that called for um chickpeas like ground up chickpeas so they were soaked overnight and then um we made these muffins but they didn’t turn out very well they were kind of flat so but I’ve never worked with dry um chickpea flour so

Alison:
It sounds similar if you’re grinding them um chickpea flour I I first used it in um Italy because there’s a traditional pancake recipe with chickpea flour but and the traditional recipe doesn’t have it soaked and we’re not so great with um, pulses so I haven’t experimented with it more but if people can um can digest it well that’s an option the other option which I learned about in Italy is chestnut flour which is just wonderful for pancakes it’s so sweet and yeah wonderful just mixed in in and of itself just with water and made into pancakes all mixed you know with half another grain so you could put it with buckwheat and then the pancakes are really good with ricotta and different things on them so that’s another option with all with all these grains you know you’ll say you’re soaking your rice i’m assuming you’re soaking your buckwheat as well when you use it are you yes yeah okay yeah and with the oats you’ve already explained that you’re soaking them all so ideally with all of these grains we would soak them um ideally overnight in warm water with an acidic medium like you mentioned apple cider vinegar or that can be kefir and that helps reduce the load of the anti-nutrients on them so that when you come to eat them you’re able to absorb more nutrients. You said you don’t eat many grains would you eat them once or twice a week Rebecca how often?

Rebecca:
Well aside from what we have for breakfast because that’s you know almost every day occasionally I’ll make like a coconut flour muffin but that’s not very often. For supper we’ll probably have them maybe once or twice a week.

Alison:
Okay. And when we talked about the content of this episode, we had a little discussion beforehand. You kind of, I said to you, well, you’re not hungry, you know, not eating those grains all the time. And you sort of talked about how you use vegetables and how you’ve got used to that being different. Can you speak to that for a little bit?

Rebecca:
Well, like I said before, you know, I found ways to sort of substitute the grains because a lot of times, especially if you’re using, you know, commercially made breads and pastas and things like that, it’s really just a filler. There’s not really a whole lot of nutritional content to it. And so I’ve started looking at other things that could be, you know, quote unquote fillers that actually had nutrients in them and were nourishing. And so things like root vegetables are a really big part of it because, you know, it’s just a lot of times it’s just a different type of carb. I think things like fat can really help too just in terms of helping you to feel full. Yeah um and then of course protein you know so instead of focusing on sort of like a bread or a pasta or rice or something like that as as the the bulk of the meal or the filling part of the meal we’ll just put a little bit more emphasis on the other things so like the meat or the fat um or um including more than one side that would be more filling yeah

Alison:
I like that idea that that you would maybe have more vegetables than you’re used to, the people who might be used to, and if they’re eating bread, that’s obviously the thing that’s going to fill you up. But if you’re not eating bread, then just bringing more vegetables to your plate is giving you that kind of bulk, that fiber, which will fill you up along with the fat and the protein that you’re eating. So that’s cool.

Rebecca:
Yeah.

Alison:
Okay. We’re going to talk about gluten-free bread next, but let’s go to a break before we get to that okay okay so let’s talk a little bit about gluten-free bread because I feel like this is something that is asked of Andrew and I a lot um let’s talk about first your experience um with trying to make gluten-free bread and how it how it’s is for you at the moment whether you do that.

Rebecca:
Well, I don’t, um, I mean, I’ll make, well, I’ll start at the beginning. Okay. So as I said, when we first went gluten-free, um, I was just, you know, going to the store and finding whatever packages had gluten-free things. And at the time there was, there were some things, but not nearly as many as there are now. Okay. And so I found a recipe for a gluten-free bread that you could make in a bread maker. So I bought a bread maker and I think it called for five different types of flour. It was like masa flour and rice, white rice flour. And I can’t even remember what else. Amaranth. So I bought all these different flours and I made this bread and it was sort of shaped like a whale. And it was very dense and very hard and it tasted terrible. And I said, I’m not going to do this anymore. okay

Alison:
And what happened to the bread maker did it just do that one thing.

Rebecca:
And i eventually sold yeah i think we i think we tried some gluten-free bread mixes but they weren’t any better um and so i think i eventually sold it on ebay so i did get some money back not from the flour so no um so after that it was sort of that was when i started to go more grain free yeah and so i was experimenting with like almond flour breads and coconut flour breads and things like that and that’s what we did for a very long time. But of course, you know, it’s not completely ideal because almond flour, if it’s not soaked and, um, prepared properly. And, and, and at the time I wasn’t buying, um, organic almond flour. So there’s, you know, now I’ve learned there’s a concern with glyphosate. Um, and it’s also high in phytic acid. So that was, you know, there’s always, it felt like there was never really just an ideal substitution for it. And I still occasionally bake with almond flour. Um, we have some brownies that we make that are made from ground up walnuts, um, which is really good. Um, and then occasionally I’ll make, like I said, the cornbread, um, when we’re having chili.

Alison:
Yeah.

Rebecca:
I did experiment, um, just because you guys inspired me to with sourdough. Um, I made some Teff, sourdough Teff, um, flatbreads.

Alison:
Okay.

Rebecca:
And then the name of them is, is escaping me right now. I cannot think of the name. It’s not, yes, that’s it. Yes. Um, I made that and that was really good, but I only did it the one time and I’ve tried to, um, make, and you and I’ve talked about this, um, gluten free, or I’m sorry, buckwheat sourdough and Despite all of the fermenting I’ve done over the years, sourdough has been such a challenge for me personally. But I still, you know, I still want to keep trying. And so I’m excited to hear what you’re going to say also about gluten-free bread because it’s been kind of hit or miss for me. So, yeah. Share your wisdom with us, Alison.

Alison:
I haven’t gone. You know, a lot of the patrons on Discord are absolute aficionados with gluten-free sourdough bread. I wouldn’t put myself in that category because I think I haven’t needed to, you know, we’ve been able to eat gluten for most of the time. So I haven’t pushed it that far. But I also think that I’m, I’m kind of not that bothered by making it look and make it look like one of those breads that people take photos of, you know, right. It holds together and it slices all right. I kind of consider that a win.

Alison:
I think that we tend to overcomplicate bread and it doesn’t have to be complicated. So first of all, the injera pancakes that you’re talking about, they are a bread. I know they’re not a loaf that you slice, but they are bread. So there are lots of flatbreads and pancakes. You can make flatbreads or pancakes out of virtually any grain. So buckwheat, is great without any additions like i said you can make a pancake out of it some of the gluten grains can be bristle i think i alluded to kind of millet sorghum you can grind those into flour and mix them with water but if you then try and fry that up it won’t stick together but if you can eat eggs you can just pop an egg in there and that will bind everything together so it’s more like a pancake again and with the egg it’s sort of got more depth to it but you could put millet and sorghum and teff and anything into an egg kind of mix and it will stick together, Oat cakes are another wonderful thing. You know, your husband’s making those oat pancakes. There are also dry oat cakes, you know, so not pancake style, but more like, well, we would call them biscuit style.

Rebecca:
Okay.

Alison:
I guess you might call them a biscuit as well, like a crunch.

Rebecca:
Yeah, it sounds like it.

Alison:
Like a cracker, perhaps.

Rebecca:
Okay, so more flat.

Alison:
Thin, yeah. Thin and crunchy. Yeah, yeah. So like an oat cracker. you can make those you know literally just with oats that you get from a store porridge oats you can whisk them up in a grinder to make them a bit smaller and put fat and water with them um that’s one of the recipes that’s on my site oat cakes like that were eaten in um England Scotland and Wales for centuries um so again that’s not complicated the other thing that I like to make is a polenta bread which is just making up a polenta which I often do with millet flour and then um putting that into a loaf tin leaving it to cool patting it down leaving it to cool turning it up onto a plate out onto a plate and then it’s like a loaf which you can keep in the fridge and cut and eat as it is or fry there’s a recipe for that in my download baking with ancient grains which is available i’m just on my home page and that again it is it’s not a bread if your definition of bread is based on Instagram but it is a bread, it’s a kind of a nice thing you can put on the side of your dinner.

Alison:
I think it’s, Most of the gluten-free breads that I’ve made have been denser than wheat breads. I know you can make them not dense. You can go and add all these additives in and other things and play around, and you can make them be light and airy. I’ve not gone that far. I have a millet and sorghum sourdough bread, which is on my site, which is just, it’s simple. It’s millet, sorghum, sourdough, salt, water. And it cooks up nicely you can slice it um but it’s it’s not light and airy and it’s interesting because you know quite a few people have made it and some people have come back and said oh well it’s already dense yeah i do say in the recipe that it won’t look like you know and i want it to look like this thing with a big you know rise and etc whereas other people.

Alison:
Have come to me and said this bread is amazing you know it’s lectin-free it’s gluten-free and it costs about a tenth of what I pay in the shop to buy a lectin and gluten-free bread and I’m just making it at home and I know what’s in it you know um so it’s sort of expectations if you want to go down the path of making it look perfect you can but I haven’t gone that far it’ll take more time and probably ingredients it’s a and more ingredients and it’s a big learning curve you know if you do if you do want to make it more straight mainstream i think you know you have to remember what’s in a bread what do i need in a gluten-free bread to make it um look as much as possible like a normal bread and you you know you need your flour then you need a binder to make it stick together and you need some starch to make the crumb nicer, So if you’re looking at those three things, to start with the flour, you can balance the flour. So some flours are heavy, buckwheat flour is quite heavy, but you can then mix it up and mix it with a lighter flour, like millet, to get somewhere in the middle, you know, the balance of those flours.

Alison:
The binder, the easiest one to use is eggs, you know, and particularly from an ancestral point of view, that’s the best one to use if you can tolerate them, because that will just make your bread stick together. But some people use psyllium husk some people use linseed and then there’s guar gum and xanthan gum which are in a lot of the kind of posh um gluten-free bread recipes that you’ll see on people’s sites the starch um side of it that lightens the bread and like i said makes a nice crumb you can use potato starch you can use tapioca some people use cornstarch um and and And that’s just the kind of simple end of it. I think if you go into a supermarket and you pick up a gluten-free loaf and you look at the ingredients on that bread, you must have done that, Rebecca, yeah?

Rebecca:
Oh, yes, definitely, yeah, especially in the beginning. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot in there.

Alison:
It’s terrifying, isn’t it?

Rebecca:
Right, it’s a lot of stuff.

Alison:
You’re like, what’s this? Why do I need that? Why do I need that? You don’t need that. That’s what I’m trying to say. even when you’re making a posh loaf a loaf that you want to look really nice I know because I’ve seen loaves that supporters of the podcast have made and they’re not using all those you know 50 things that are on the list um of a packaged loaf that you would get in a store but.

Rebecca:
Yeah I think

Alison:
Like you said it does need some time educating yourself yes and trying these things out yeah um You mentioned grain crackers earlier on, and how do you make those?

Rebecca:
Well, there’s a couple. Usually those are almond flour.

Alison:
Almond flour.

Rebecca:
Yeah. Yeah. So you just, you know, mix up the batter and then you can roll it out flat and cut them into individual squares. And that works well. So sometimes we’ll splurge and we’ll get seed crackers from the store that have very simple ingredients. And those are, you know, every once in a while a convenience food that’s nice.

Alison:
Yeah. There is a flax seed, linseed bread recipe, which is in Ben Greenfield’s book that I saw. But it’s written by Dr. Sarah Myhill, who people may have heard of. And that one is literally just, I think it’s linseed, salt and water. It’s really, really simple. I remember making linseed crackers when Rob and I ate raw food and we used to put them in the dehydrator. So I know those can come out quite nicely. you know so if you’re if you want a bread that’s grain free linseed is something you can turn to and then coconut flour which you talked about using before yeah i remember when we were doing gaps there being coconut flour i think there’s some coconut flour pancakes in hillary boynton’s book yes yep um and so coconut flour is something you can turn to and then like you just said, you’ve made crackers with just is it just almond flour and water with a bit of salt.

Rebecca:
You know it’s been so long i honestly don’t remember there may have been some kind of binder in it um but i don’t remember

Alison:
Okay i remember a long time ago rob made some um, christmas we call them mince pies i don’t think you have them in the states like a a little sort of tart thing with um mixed kind of peels and raisins and sultanas all in no.

Rebecca:
No we don’t i’ve heard of them but i don’t i don’t think they’re common here

Alison:
They’re very good i think i might be bringing them in on a christmas episode to try and get the stage.

Rebecca:
Good good you’ll make you’ll make it a new thing here exactly

Alison:
Um rob made some of those with almond flour pastry he’s made me and a long time ago i made some cornish pasties with almond flour pastry as well so that’s again something you can experiment with if you if you want to have a bread but you don’t even want to use any grains at all, Okay. Do you think that you’ll experiment with more gluten-free beds or are you just happy with what you’ve got there and the routine that you’ve got?

Rebecca:
I do still hope to i mean i’ve the just the i mean it okay so it can get expensive to experiment um but i want to i want to keep trying because i really do miss the texture of just you know straight up bread grain free things with almond flour or coconut flour which coconut flour has actually become less of an option for us because it usually requires a lot of eggs so my daughter can’t have it. Um, but almond flour, I mean, they’re good. They’re good in their own way. And I think that that, you know, that’s probably the key to eating gluten-free is that it’s not going to be the same, um, but it can be good in its own way. And so I’m, I’m happy with what we, we have, but just from the perspective of learning more about food and how it’s been traditionally made and offering us more options I definitely would like to experiment more more with sourdough oh

Alison:
Let me know how you get on I’d love to know okay.

Rebecca:
I will okay

Alison:
Is there anything else that I haven’t asked about um that you think would be of benefit to people listening.

Rebecca:
I think if, you know, if you’re first going gluten-free, it can seem a little overwhelming and intimidating, especially if you’re used to having, you know, a lot of gluten. But it doesn’t have to be complicated. And I think that if you don’t make it complicated, like I did getting a bread maker and five different kinds of flour and making a whale loaf and all this stuff in the beginning, if you don’t do it from that angle, like you’re trying to find a replacement for gluten. In terms of like, I need to have a bread that is just like a sandwich bread that is just like the bread that I’m used to. If you just think of it as this is just a different way of eating, it’s sort of like, you know, switching from a standard American diet or standard British diet to more eating more ancestrally. It’s a different way of eating. It’s just a different way of thinking about food. And when you approach it from the perspective that what you’re consuming is healing you, and you don’t necessarily have to replace identically the things that you were eating before, it does make it more simple. And you will get used to it. I don’t even really think about it anymore, honestly, just because we’re so used to eating this way at home. It’s not it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice or an inconvenience anymore at this point

Alison:
Wonderful thank you do you have if people are wanting to kind of experiment or want to take the step and go gluten-free where would you point them do you have some books that are always down you know in your kitchen or resources you think would be good for them i.

Rebecca:
Really like the recipes most of the recipes from nourishing meals.com and all of hers i believe are gluten-free We, Um, you know, I don’t, I don’t have any specific gluten-free websites that I go to because again, a lot of them are going to just be using a lot of replacement flours, which, you know, are, are not ideal. And so generally what I do is I look for websites with recipes or books with recipes that I know will like. And then if it calls for some sort of gluttony substance in it, I will just think, okay, what could we have instead of that? So like mashed potatoes or instead of pasta, we just have brown rice pasta. That’s the one time we’ll have brown rice. And that’s occasionally. Um you know just just keep it very very simple um so yeah i don’t i can’t i can’t say that i have any specific gluten-free options just because of the fact that they will just include lots of fillers

Alison:
I think you know a lot of our listeners are used to that because they’ll buy normal recipes and they’ll be like oh i don’t want to put that sugar in i don’t put this in so they’re used to making them ancestral ancestralizing them anyway right so to turn that attention to gluten in case so how can I just switch this up a bit and make it gluten it’s a kind of a similar thing to do.

Rebecca:
Yeah yep exactly that

Alison:
Wonderful well thank you very much for your time Rebecca for.

Rebecca:
Sharing you welcome thanks for having

Alison:
Me really really useful so your website is ahumbleplace.com you’ve got your meal plans on there you also have um a wonderful resource for teaching cooking with nourishing traditions to kids which people can find and i will put all the links to those and all the other recipes that we’ve talked about in the show notes all right sounds good well um hopefully we’ll have you back next year rebecca to talk about something else okay.

Rebecca:
Thank you i’d love to

Alison:
Thank you bye thank.

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