Gluten-Free: Instant Oatmeal by Sahra Kant

Hello, MassBytes readers! I’m the new gluten-free blogger; I will be bringing information & reviews on gluten-free food (bought & made), recipes, restaurants, events, related issues and more straight to your wheatless mouth every Thursday.

For a little background, I come from a family of celiacs. My mother, daughter, and myself are all gluten-free. Between my mother & I we’ve been unable to eat wheat, rye, barley or the lesser-known glutinous grains for about a decade and my daughter Liberty has never had gluten since her birth in 2010. A substantial amount of changes has occurred over the course of this century thus far, making eating a lot easier for us and our fellow celiacs -- thankfully, since it used to be almost impossible to shop in normal supermarkets & eat even remotely safely at restaurants!

One of these changing products is oatmeal. Oatmeal is a tough one for people who are gluten-free out of medical necessity. Technically oats are naturally gluten-free. However, oats are a rotation crop with wheat, barley and rye particularly in the United States; your mileage may vary in other countries, making it even more confusing! What a “rotation crop” means is the verboten grains planted in other years pop up in the field with the oats, thus cross-contaminating both in the field and within the harvesting & processing. Gluten-free oats are grown like organic oats, requiring the field to be unused for four years prior to planting, and then processed on specific equipment only for the gluten-free oats.

Up until recently, the only option was Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free oats. Don’t get me wrong -- their oats are great, especially for baking into recipes (more on that another time), but it is complicated and time-consuming to make oatmeal as a dish on its own the old-fashioned way. I’ve found they rarely come out the way I want them for that purpose. Additionally, they only come in plain.

Enter Glutenfreeda with flavored instant oatmeal. Let me repeat that: flavored instant oatmeal. And it’s delicious! It comes in several flavors: apple cinnamon, maple raisin, banana maple, natural (plain), strawberry & brown sugar, cranberry cinnamon, and a variety pack containing the first three listed flavors. All of them contain (extremely healthy) flax except for plain. Like any “normal” instant oatmeal, this product can be prepared with piping hot water from a kettle or in a microwave. Easy peasy!
I buy the variety pack almost exclusively; I prefer the apple cinnamon & maple raisin flavors and Liberty prefers the banana maple, so it works very well for us. Like most if not all gluten-free packaged foods, it’s not cheap but it is so worth it for the pleasure of having instant oatmeal and being able to easily give it to my child.

A mixture of the apple cinnamon and maple raisin flavors.  My
preferred way to eat this oatmeal.  Yum!

Liberty's banana maple oatmeal.

You can buy Glutenfreeda instant oatmeal at most supermarkets and gluten-free shopping websites, but I prefer to buy from Amazon (direct product link to variety pack) at a steep discount, especially via their Subscribe & Save program at an even steeper discount.

Enjoy your breakfast! :)