Many years ago I discovered that I was gluten intolerant and…YAWN! You’re probably not interested in my gluten story because you have heard a million stories from every health conscious diet fiddler you have ever meet. The short of it is that gluten and I don’t get along any more. I enjoy the occasional beer on special occasions but anything beyond that has bad effects.
Mrs. EveningSun and I decided a long time ago that feeding our children foods that we wouldn’t eat just didn’t feel right. Going to Mc Ds every week for the kids when we haven’t set foot in the place in over a decade didn’t sit right with us either. So we are a gluten-free house through and through.
With this comes some challenges, especially when trying to save every dollar that comes through our checking account. GF bread at our local store can cost around $7 a loaf, ouch. At Costco that same bread is $9 for two loaves, better but still on the pricy side. While we strive to eat less grains, our morning fried eggs are just so much better with a nicely buttered piece of toast. Also the kids go through PB & Js like you wouldn’t believe. Our spend on bread really starts to add.
I have done some baking in the past when I was a gluten indulger but it has been a long time. Recently a friend of our reintroduced gluten to their diet and went back to dark side. I guess some horrible symptom that they had experienced went away so they figured it was a good time to glut out on wheat. This is how we came into the possession of a bag of Pamela’s Gluten Free Bread Mix. It sat and sat until one day I decided to give it a shot and mixed up a batch.
We don’t own a bread maker, like our dark side friends do, but we have a large machine we bought used from a neighbor’s garage sale. It heats nicely and keeps temperature well, we call it an oven. Pamela’s mix only requires that you add yeast, oil, eggs and water. And we can get a loaf for $2.56 worth of bread mix. Oil is cheap, we get our own eggs for less than $3 a dozen and if you buy yeast in bulk its a super value.
I think that one of these days we will upgrade to a bread maker to save on the biggest expense which is our time. For now though we are happy with the savings that we have discovered with this mix.
We buy the 25 pound bag of Pamela’s on Amazon for the best price.
Happy gluten-free baking!