for those of us with celiac and bread issues....

an update

I've been working with a long ferment (2-3 days) wild sourdough, and having good success with it.

I've adapted a 'no knead' recipe (the new york times one) and happily enough, eating this bread has caused me very little distress (one loaf that I didn't let work the full 2 days) to absolutely none (2 days or more of fermentation). my celiac health problems are abating, even, which is an unexpected result.

I cant' speak for all celiac sufferers, but I can say that for me, this is working, and I'm so glad to be able to have BREAD after years of not being able to.

it's a fairly dense, hearty bread, with a crackly crust and a chewy crumb, but I'm in hog heaven.

I'll try to get pictures and such. maybe. if I can find the camera...

update after several years - when I moved away from Texas and lost my sourdough starter, I tried again, and wound up with symptoms again. worse than before.

turns out my sourdough starter here contained A. niger (black mold) which has a protease that breaks down the glutenin and gliadin in modern wheat into nonreactive fragments. without that particular 'pollutant', my sourdough starter didn't break it down properly.. I was back to square one.

I did some further research, and found that I can tolerate einkorn, which is a proto-wheat (grains were found on otzi the iceman, for example), because my particular celiac troubles are caused by a sensitivity to storage proteins in modern wheat, most notably those mutated into a different folding pattern due to wheat being crossbred with goatgrass in the mid70's to both increase yield and dwarf the plants to make for easier mechanized harvesting.

I can't be totally certain that the einkorn isn't causing gut damage, but when I came across the research I found for the changes in folding patterns between the old proto-grains and the modern stuff, I did something borderline suicidal.

normally, exposure to a quantity similar in size to a pinhead will leave me stuck sick for upwards of two weeks (I will fail to describe the symptoms here in great detail. let it instead be known that I am intimately acquainted with the size, color, shape, pattern and number of the tiles on the bathroom floor.) a quantity greater than that can (and will) hospitalize me. (one such event happened last year. my mother had back surgery, and while visiting her in the hospital, I wound up carrying mrsa home with me. I ate a quantity of oatmeal that was cross contaminated with either wheat, barley or rye, which sent my immune system into attacking my guts, and allowed the mrsa to infect me. i wound up with surgery on my foot and a 10 day stay in the hospital. I'm only just now recovering back to my old self. The doctors said my immune system was working so poorly on anything but attacking my intestines that I literally shut down twice while they were operating on me, and had to give me the same kind of immunosuppressants they provide organ donors to prevent rejection. it gets bad if i'm not careful)

I ordered a small packed (8 ounces) of the grains, ground them in a blender, added a little water, and made basically a primitive flatbread. I ate about 1/4 ounce, fully expecting to be in abject misery.. surprisingly.. I felt nothing. no symptoms at all. I waited 24 hours, just in case it was a delayed reaction. nothing.

so I ate a full ounce. nothing. I ground the rest, made several flour tortillas from it, and ate them over the course of the next three days to see what kind of threshold I might have. 

I was completely asymptomatic. shocked. surprised. and thrilled. I can have bread and things again. I have to make them all myself, and the flour's expensive (I have to import it from a farm in italy that grows /only/ einkorn.. the good thing is, it's so far removed from modern wheat, there's no crossbreeding, and the mill processes only the einkorn.. because it's got the seed coat on it, it requires threshing and other practices to make it usable. the grains are also smaller and less in quantity, so that also adds to the price. it comes in just shy of 3$ a pound... but it does have a very pleasant flavor, and it works.. so i'm happy.)

I kept seeing this in my 'posted' threads, and didn't want to leave it sitting there as it was. it was nagging at me.