Pizza, biscuits and 'real' bread are back on the menu for people with coeliac disease - and gluten-free beer is the next research challenge, writesDick Ahlstrom.
Coeliacs have long endured an unpalatable diet because of their need to avoid cereal gluten at all costs. Now researchers at University College Cork and Teagasc's National Food Centre have joined forces to develop gluten substitutes that put the taste back into gluten-free dining.
"They don't only taste better, they are nutritionally better," says Dr Elke Arendt of UCC's department of food science, food technology and nutrition. Her research team joined with Dr Ronan Gormley and Eimear Gallagher of Teagasc, industrial partners and the Coeliac Society of Ireland to improve the taste and texture of a range of gluten-free foods, funded by the Government's National Development Plan 2000-2006.
"Ireland has the highest incidence of coeliac disease in the world, yet the range of gluten-free products is often poor and there is very little funding for this area of research," says Arendt. The Coeliac Society of Ireland estimates that at least one in every 200 people here is a diagnosed coeliac, although undiagnosed cases could push this figure up to one in 60, she believes.
Coeliac disease is a condition where the body can't tolerate gluten, a protein found in cereals including wheat, oats, rye and barley and in foods made from these cereals or containing cereal ingredients. It causes a range of symptoms, including fatigue, abdominal pain, anaemia, diarrhoea and constipation.
"The research started off five years ago at UCC," she says. "I had a student with coeliac disease. He was complaining about the low quality of food developed for coeliacs."
The first thing she did was examine what gluten-free products were already on the market, and what she found wasn't very enticing. Flavour and consistency were poor and a far remove from the breads and biscuits that contained gluten.
The structure of the products was mostly crumbly and very dry. "They were nothing like the slice of bread you or I would eat," says Arendt.
The team started examining alternatives to gluten in three product lines: biscuits, breads and pizza dough, pizzas being one of the most popular convenience foods. The object, she explains, was to develop a product without gluten that retained both the flavour and the texture of the original.
In biscuits this involved assessing a range of alternative starches, from corn, soya, millet, rice and potatoes. These were combined with a number of fats, including palm oil, cream powder, microencapsulated high fat powder and low fat dairy powder.
They found that a combination of rice, potato, corn and soya starch with high fat powders produced biscuits of comparable quality.
Similar success was had with a gluten-free pizza base. Existing products were more like a cake than a hard dough, but a combination of alternative starches and fats again produced an improved base.
Breads were the greatest challenge, says Arendt. Gluten is a key feature of bread making, but the team combined starches from corn, potato, soya, buckwheat and rice with gums and dairy ingredients to produce a gluten-free bread of similar quality to wheat bread.
The group worked closely with the Coeliac Society of Ireland to confirm that the new foods were indeed as good as they believed.
"They found any of the products we developed so far were far superior to anything they had eaten before," says Arendt.
Their taste-test panel also included non-coeliacs, so they had reliable data from the tests.
The next great challenge is to produce a gluten-free beer. Barley contains gluten, so an alternative is required that can still produce a good brew. They have already produced a "quite good" beer based on sorghum and are now running experiments to try and malt buckwheat, a pseudo-cereal that does not contain gluten. She is confident that this work too will lead to a good-quality alterative.
"These products are ready to go to market," she says. "We are looking for commercial companies who will take these products and commercialise them."