The best offtheshelf gluten free bread you can buy
Most gluten free breads pale in comparison to real bread - they are cakey, crumbly and you need to toast them twice to have any chance of enjoying them. After more than a decade of disappointment trying different brands, both from local bakeries and the supermarket, I was surprised and excited to find the "Pure-Bred" gluten free bread range from (even more surprising) Coles supermarkets.
The main difference with the Pure-Bred bread is that it is soft. You push your finger into one of the hot dog buns and they bounce back like a hot dog bun should. Take a look at the following picture, which shows how you can bend a slice of this gluten free bread without it snapping in half like most other gluten free breads I've tried. This means you can make a sandwich and eat it without the pieces crumbling into your lap before you are half way through.
Giving a slice of purebred raisin bread the flex test. Look, not even a crack.
Next I tested the hot dog buns. You can see in the following picture that when you slice the bun along its length, it is still joined at the hinge. That means you can fill your bun with your favourite fillings and they won't fall out through the hinge as you eat it. That's quite revolutionary for a gluten free bread.
A gluten free bun that is still joined at the hinge after you open it truly amazing
I looked on the packet at the list of ingredients to see if I could work out why it succeeded when so many others had failed before it, but there were no items that I hadn't seen listed in other gluten free products. However the list of ingredients was overly long, probably because of where it is made.
The Pure Bred brand coming all the way from Ireland to Australia
Unfortunately, this bread comes all the way from Ireland. At first I was dumbfounded by this - how can it be feasible for my bread to be baked on the other side of the planet? Apparently it is baked in Ireland, frozen, transported to Australia and then thawed locally by Coles when they want to sell it. So it's definitely not fresh bread, and there are some issues around the environmental cost of transporting bread half way around the world just so you can have a sandwich. You'll need to weigh these downsides up for yourself. The products on offer seem to vary from store to store, but I've seen white bread loaves, raisin bread loaves, the multi-grain hot dog buns and fruit buns.
The raisin bread loaf
I'm also conscious that if the Australian dollar drops, it will no longer be financially viable to distribute the bread from Ireland to Australia and I'll lose my only supply of decent gluten free bread. If that happens, hopefully Pure-Bred can open a bakery here in Australia, or someone can learn how to copy their recipe. If anyone thinks they know of a better gluten free bread that's made locally, feel free to let me know.
The finished product ready to sink your teeth into
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235171 - 2023-07-18 00:07:11