Can This Baking Genius Make A Gluten-Free Bread that doesn’t Suck?

in the future earlier this year, Tom Gumpel left work feeling terrible. the top baker of Panera Bread—the Downton Abbey of quick food with a nice elegant-to-trashy ratio—Gumpel had been tasked with coming up with a gluten-free product for the company to provide. but he’d failed. What’s more, he didn’t even recognize if success used to be conceivable. He failed to understand what to do subsequent. He wasn’t even in particular occupied with doing anything gluten free. He was a baker, after all, no longer a development follower!

the former dean of the Bakery and Pastry faculty on the Culinary Institute of the us, Gumpel is rapturous about bread, and excitedly says things like: “lengthy cool-fermentation bread constituted of historical sprouted grains will not be simply excellent for you, they’re like the best foods on earth!”

He’d come to Panera beneath the belief that he’d get to do extra—and more creative—issues with bread. “I got here into this whole factor kicking and screaming,” he says, from the company’s workplaces in Saint Louis. “I haven’t come across a gluten-free bread that’s even relatively fit to be eaten, or palatable, even. I imply, we could have jumped into this two years ago and put out a rice flower roll. That was once a nutritionally baseless gluten-free product, and it wouldn’t have been proper for us.”

the correct Bread For the emblem

Gluten is a combination of two proteins that’s found in everything from soy sauce to beer. It’s especially the most important in bread. bring to mind the essential houses of a loaf of bread—its sponginess, its airiness, its fantastically chewy texture—and also you’re pretty much just describing what gluten does. Making bread with out it can be very tough.

“imagine the 25 or 30 components you must put in place to make up for what gluten offers: gums, starches, all this stuff,” Gumpel says.

while penning this story, I picked up a bag of Udi’s the whole lot within Gluten Free Bagels, which looked extra like brief dinner rolls with holes cut within the center. Appearances aside, they in fact tasted amazingly breadlike: chewy, springy, and so they didn’t disintegrate after I bit into them. however just as Gumpel estimated, the substances record was once very long, together with issues like tapioca maltodextrin, xanthan gum, cultured corn syrup solids, and “enzymes.”

When Panera tried to do something an identical, he told me, the implications have been mainly a catastrophe. “We stated, ‘Wow. this is not who we are.’ I left the lab that day pronouncing, ‘i will’t see this. i can’t take a look at this and get it out to our buyers with any kind of integrity or pleasure.'”

was Gumpel doomed? Is it even possible to make just right gluten-free bread? And why was Panera even bothering in the first place?

How GF happened

Bread has been certainly one of humanity’s staple meals, going again around 10,000 years. To nowadays, types of bread are one of the vital foundational meals of cultures from Ethiopia to India to Latin the us. And yet bread is beneath attack. the concept bread—or more specifically, gluten—is unhealthy has gripped the worldwide recognition, and that does not look like letting go.

The gluten-free motion is amorphous and hard to pin down, much like the “toxins” which are supposedly being flushed out of your body by way of a juice cleanse. then again, most of the people with a gluten downside generally come in certainly one of two groups. In one of them are folks physiologically unable to course of gluten: these other people have celiac illness. A 2012 Mayo hospital survey found that just below 2 million individuals in the us undergo from it (there is also a good smaller collection of individuals with critical wheat allergies). an additional 18 million people declare to be “gluten-delicate,” or that eating it makes them really feel dangerous in some undefined means. This crew makes up a big component of the gluten-free movement.

A 2013 learn about by using Peter Gibson, the same scientist who first discovered proof of non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), found, “In a placebo-managed, pass-over rechallenge find out about, we discovered no proof of explicit or dose-established effects of gluten in patients with NCGS.” briefly, at least in keeping with one learn about, individuals who declare to be gluten delicate will not be so sensitive, in the end.

regardless of how imaginary or not its benefits, the gluten-free market is a very real factor. From 2009 to 2014, retail gross sales of gluten-free foods grew at a fee of about 34%; in 2014, total sales of gluten-free merchandise were $973 million, according to market analysis agency Packaged information; the overall gluten-free market, according to market-research agency Mintel, is estimated to be around $eight.8 billion. A January 2015 Nielsen record on the meals market found that bread gross sales were down 3% in 2014, even whereas sales of cookies, chocolate, and chips had been all growing. that very same survey sorted foods into the classes wholesome, semi-wholesome, and indulgent: sugar-laden issues like sports activities drinks and “dairy-primarily based shakes” had been regarded as wholesome, while bread used to be most effective semi-wholesome.

Will Panera upward push?

Panera shouldn’t be immune from these traits; its internet profits has been falling this 12 months, including 12% in Q1 and 15% in Q2. In a written observation, the corporate attributed that to “important sessions of investment within the lengthy-term success of our trade,” including making improvements to digital and mobile get right of entry to. still, it’s laborious not to see these broader developments at play.

That evening he left work feeling defeated, Tom Gumpel had a revelation about his gluten-free failure.

“It doesn’t have to be a loaf of bread,” he idea. “If you have to use all these further ingredients to raise a loaf of bread, just make it a small roll. Why don’t we make a focaccia roll, so we don’t have this uphill combat of making this construction?”

Over the cellphone Gumpel says: “So I went again to the lab the following morning and made a focaccia roll, and it has not changed that a lot for the reason that first day I played with it.”

That roll is constituted of sorghum, a naturally gluten-free grain. It’s stuffed with sprouted seeds like broccoli, flax, and chia. it is going to be on hand next fall at Panera locations across the u . s . a .. It appears, basically, like a yellow hamburger bun coated in black speckles.

I sampled the product myself, but wanted an knowledgeable to lend a hand me to decide how good it is.

So I had one sent to April Peveteaux, an LA-primarily based celiac sufferer and author of the blog-to-guide Gluten Is My Bitch. After she got it, I referred to as Peveteaux to get her opinion on Gumpel’s work.

She sighed deeply.

“It’s so sad,” she says.

the corporate had shipped her roll to an LA-area region, and a few miscommunication with the group of workers there intended they’d required her to stay within the restaurant to consume it. This did not put Peveteaux at ease. “I’ve by no means been in a Panera in my lifestyles and i’m somewhat panicky right now. I’m surrounded by way of bread! I’m a celiac! i think like I’m at warfare and that i’m totally surrounded!”

This used to be no longer like my expertise: I ate mine in relative luxury, having had it hand-delivered via one of the most firm’s publicists. My rolls—one plain and one toasted—came utterly undeniable. given that Peveteaux used to be in a restaurant, she convinced them to add turkey and cheese to her untoasted bun. This didn’t go smartly.

“The sandwich used to be surely falling apart,” she said. “It had that grainy, dry, falling-aside factor that occurs to so many mass-produced breads that are gluten-free. It simply kinda occurs.”

Peveteaux in the end scraped the components from the primary bun into the 2nd. sadly, that one additionally started to crumble. I requested her to explain the buns, and he or she paused sooner than announcing, “The mouthfeel is . . . crumbly.”

i’m sorry to assert that I agree. I started with the untoasted roll. It had no elasticity, and i discovered it aggressively dry. used to be it squeaking as I bit it, or used to be that my creativeness? It was so dry that, feeling a way of charity, I wrote in my notes: “Your saliva kind of melts it ultimately?”

when you bite into it, crumbs fall onto the table. At a definite point, I just crushed pieces of it between my thumb and forefinger until it disappeared (which didn’t take lengthy). The toasted one was once significantly better. Gumpel explained that heated bread tastes higher. but to assert it was once “better” is to not say it got here any place close to actual bread.

“I don’t mean to be a dick, but it surely’s simply actually not good,” Peveteaux says, with notes of defeat in her voice. “in truth, I hate to do that because i need people to take a look at this stuff more, i need people to scan with gluten-free. There’s people who are living in the middle of america who don’t have get admission to to a number of stuff, but could be as regards to a Panera, so it might be great if that they had just right gluten-free stuff. nevertheless it’s simply truly, really now not good.”

“I in point of fact Don’t Get It!”

on the end of the day, Panera has an extraordinarily specific mission for this roll. whereas the actual product is gluten free, Panera only refers to it as “gluten-conscious.” That’s since the second the roll leaves its plastic sleeve, it’s in an intensely gluten-rich surroundings. So, truly, the roll is just for people who find themselves going gluten-free with the aid of possibility.

“when it comes to sandwiches, and particularly bread, we wish the individual’s who’s taking the route of gluten free to have that possibility,” Gumpel explains.

Peveteaux, for her part, loves bread and may’t fathom why anyone would willingly go gluten-free. “I was diagnosed almost 5 years in the past, right originally of the kind of zeitgeist of it,” she says. “but I in point of fact don’t get it! As any individual who can’t devour gluten, I in reality want to devour gluten! I don’t comprehend why somebody would want to do this.”