Coeliac disease and gluten-free apple cake

  This blog is for anyone with Coeliac disease or anyone who does not, for any reason, eat gluten. As part of a school project I will post recipes and videos of how to cook them, as well as simple tips that might help you with your dietary needs.

  I have a personal history with Coeliac. Since my sister was a small child she has been plagued with severe eczema, fatigue and pain when she eats certain meals. After we suspected she had an allergy or intolerance of some sort she took a gastroscopy. She was diagnosed with Coeliac disease so many things had to change. Going out to eat for dinner when we are on holiday is now almost impossible unless we are at home or somewhere in Norway. Our kitchen is divided into two sections: my sister’s ‘Coeliac section’ and the rest of the kitchen with gluten-containing foods. I don’t like to say ‘normal food’ because it makes it sound like having Coeliac is some unknown, foreign illness, which it’s not. I have allergies myself so we have experienced a lot of allergy exclusion which has been an unexpected burden. This blog is to help people cope with the difficulties of having dietary requirements and to offer simple recipes for families living in Norway.

What is Coeliac disease?

Coeliac is an autoimmune disease which inflames the small intestine. The effectiveness of the villi in your intestine decrease, therefore the ability to absorb nutrients decreases. About 10% of people with close relatives who have Coeliac have Coeliac themselves. It is anticipated that about 1-2% of the Norwegian population have Coeliac (NCF, 2016).

What is gluten?

Gluten is made from 2 major proteins: Gliadin and Glutenin. (YouTube, 2010). When you add water to regular flour, the proteins begin to unfold, which are originally tangled together and become more long and stringy molecules. When you knead the flour and water, you rinse out the starch and eventually end up with a ball of gluten. The proteins connect together with cross-links When you push the gluten down it bounces back to its original shape. To make bread rise you need yeast which forms bubbles of carbon dioxide that rise. When you remove the gluten, the carbon dioxide would escape from the bread (Thermo Fisher Scientific, 2015). When the Glutenin and Gliadin bond together with water they form a network of proteins called gluten which have the ability to trap air. Bread flour has more proteins and is unbleached to produce the most amount of gluten possible for the bread to trap the air and hold its form. For cake flour we only want it to hold its form and be quite light, so it is generally bleached and has a lower percentage of proteins (at least 4% less). The gluten in the cake flour is a lot less sticky and holds it form less. The gluten in bread flour is a lot more sticky and holds its form a lot more, which is important for bread (YouTube, 2013).

How does Coeliac disease affect the body?

The immune system of someone with Coeliac treats certain parts of the gluten as an unwanted presence and triggers a response that damages the small intestine. When this happens over and over again as the body exposes itself to gluten, the body begins to suffer nutritional deficiencies because the absorption of the nutrients becomes disturbed. This is why people with Coeliac have lowered immune systems, eczema etc. (NHS UK, 2014).

What are the benefits of gluten?

People without Coeliac disease can benefit from gluten because the grains that contain gluten (rye, barley, wheat) have been proven to help reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses (Nutrition Facts, 2016). Not only this, they are great sources of slow-release carbohydrates to give the body energy over the course of several hours and gives you the feeling of being fuller for longer (British Dietetic Association, 2016). From previous experience, gluten free food is notorious for being crumbly and bland. People buy gluten-including products instead because it tastes so much better and has a more appealing consistency.

Which products are best for cooking gluten-free food and how much do they cost?

The best company I have found for cooking gluten-free food in Norway is Semper. They sell a variety of different types of flour such as one for cakes, bread and pizza and are sold throughout Norway. They cost between 40 and 50 kr in most food shops such as Kiwi, Joker and all of the Coop chains e.g. Coop Extra and Coop Prix (Coop Medlemsservice, 2016), (Kiwi Kundeservice, 2016) and (Joker Servicekontoret, 2016). They are of high quality, compared to other gluten free flours that are not always (Semper, 2016).

Recipe for a simple gluten-free apple cake!

Ingredients

4 sour apples

2 eggs

150 g sugar

50 g melted butter

150 g gluten free flour

75 ml milk

1 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon powder

2 tbsp granulated brown sugar

Method

1. Peel the apples. Remove the core. Cut them into boats and place in cold water
2. Whisk the egg and sugar to get an airy mixture. Add the butter and milk.
3. Mix in the flour and baking powder and mix until you get a fine, smooth mixture.
4. Put the mixture in a cake tin (around 20x25cm) and drizzle half the cinnamon on top.
5. Drain the apples and lie the boats side by side, slightly overlapping until you have covered the cake.
6. Drizzle the rest of the cinnamon and granulated brown sugar over the apples.
7. Bake for 30-35 minutes in the middle of the oven at 220 °C.
8. Cool the cake prior to cutting.

Experiment on gluten-extraction

Introduction

I undertook this experiment to see how much gluten there is in different types of flour. I was also so interested in the fact that when people eat bread, they are eating protein as well when they generally think they are just eating starch, so I extracted the gluten to see what the protein looked like. I also did it to show people with gluten intolerance who can tolerate a bit of gluten now and again which flours have the most and least gluten in them, however this would not be relevant for someone for coeliac disease.

How much gluten is there in different types of flour in Norway?

Research question

How much gluten is there in 7 different types of flour sold in Norway?

Apparatus

• Scales (closest 2g)
• Paper
• Pencil
• Labels
• Bowls
• Siktet hvetemel (Sifted wheat flour)
• Økologisk siktet hvetemel (Ecological sifted wheat flour)
• Byggmel (Barley flour)
• Pizzamel (Pizza flour)
• Surdeigsmel (Sour-dough flour)
• Sammalt grovmalt (Whole-wheat coarsely ground)
• Sammalt finmalt (Whole-wheat finely ground)
• Cotton kitchen cloths
• Water

Method

The method I used to extract the gluten is shown on a YouTube video: Tempefilms's channel (2010) How to extract gluten from flour. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nCYhlj5Z1c [Accessed on 14th June 2016].

For each type of flour I measured out 100 g and put it into a bowl. Then I took the pile of flour inside a thin cloth over a bowl in the sink. I turned the tap on and kneaded the flour inside the cloth until much of the starch had ran out. I opened up the cloth and scraped out the sticky flour from the cloth and formed it into my hands. Over a bowl in the sink I kneaded the dough in my hands and drained more of the starch from the flour. I continued this process until the remains began to hang together. I turned off the tap and continued to knead it, adding some water to it now and then to get rid of any excess starch until all that was left was the gluten. This entire process took about 20 minutes for each flour.

Control variables

• Every type of flour was 100 g in the beginning
• Every type of flour was by the same company, Møllerens
• Similar temperature was used for extracting the starch
• Same type of cloths used
• Same water from the same tap
• Air dried gluten on the same window ledge

Dependant variables

The gluten in my experiment was the dependent variable as this was what I was trying to measure.

Independent variables

The different types of flour was my independent variable because that is what I change to influence the result.

Results

The results are shown on the table below (Figure 1). The sour-dough flour (Surdeigsmel) does not have a precise reading because the most accurate scales at home measured to the nearest 2 g, the dried gluten that I placed on the scales was too small to register on the dial. All these results are just from a single experiment, the results would be more valid if each flour was tested multiple times.

Type of flour (see Apparatus section for translations)	Mass of dried gluten (g)	Percentage of gluten in flour
Siktet hvetemel	11	11
Økologisk siktet hvetemel	13	13
Pizzamel	12	12
Surdeigsmel	Less than 2	<2
Byggmel	N/A	N/A
Sammalt grovmalt	N/A	N/A
Sammalt finmalt	N/A	N/A

Figure 1: A table to show the mass of the dried gluten from 8 different types of flour.

Discussion

These results in figure 1 are fascinating. It turned out that all of the heavier, more fibre-full wholemeal flour did not allow me to extract the gluten using the same process as I used for the other types of white flour. At first I did not know why this was, but I now think that this is because of the bran in the flour that makes it a lot more grainy. As a result the flour does not hold well together. If you take a small amount of white flour and press it, it sort of stays compacted together in that position. Whereas if you do this with wholemeal flour, it does not hold its form as well and breaks apart. Therefore I think that it is not possible for the gluten to be extracted from whole wheat flour in this way, and it needs a different experiment, or the method needs to be modified somehow.

The sour-dough flour (Surdeigsmel) does not have a precise reading because the most accurate scales I could find were measured to the nearest 2 g, and they did not pick up on the small amount of gluten that I placed on it.

Three of the flours, ecological sifted white flour (Økologisk siktet hvetemel), pizza flour (pizzamel) and Sifted wheat flour (Siktet hvetemel) showed similar levels of gluten, ranging from 11 to 13 %. More experiments need to be done to see if any difference is significant.

It is interesting to find that the ecological sifted white flour (Økologisk siktet hvetemel) has the highest levels of the protein, gluten. If this is real it would be interesting to know if it is because of the type of wheat that is grown or just because of being grown ecologically without pesticides.

I was really interested in how the gluten looked. As soon as I had extracted it it looked just like a greyish-white blob of stretchy substance that sort of resembled blu tac, but was a lot stretchier. As it dried it created little pockets of air. It became lighter and harder as the days passed and after about 2 weeks it had changed to an off-green colour which looked a bit like a tortoise shell, which was incredibly fascinating.

Reliability and improvements

I could make some improvements to this experiment that would make it more reliable. I need to repeat the experiment a number of times and see how close the results are. I could have got some more accurate scales that were accurate to less than one gram or I could start with more flour. I could have measured the temperature of the water and kept it steady throughout the experiment. Nevertheless, for a home-experiment I think this experiment was successful, however if it was to be an experiment for a company then there would have to be improvements such to make it more reliable and more valid.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that there was more gluten in the ecological sifted white flour than in the regular sifted white flour, sour-dough flour and pizza flour, and that there was a lot less gluten in the sour-dough flour compared to both sifted flours. I can also conclude that the whiter and more sifted the flour, the more successful the experiment is. If people have a gluten intolerance or are on a low-gluten diet, then for savoury products they might try the sour-dough flour, and for sweet products, they might try the regular sifted white flour.

References

• NCF (2016) Hva er cøliaki? [online] Available at: http://www.ncf.no/hva-er-coliaki [Accessed on 14th June 2016].

• YouTube (2010) How to extract gluten from flour. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nCYhlj5Z1c [Accessed on 14th June 2016].

• Thermo Fisher Scientific (2015) Overview of crosslinking and protein modification. [online] Available at: https://www.thermofisher.com/no/en/home/life-science/protein-biology/protein-biology-learning-center/protein-biology-resource-library/pierce-protein-methods/overview-crosslinking-protein-modification.html [Accessed 23rd June 2016].

• YouTube (2013) Science: A Closer Look at Gluten. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEcvSc2UKA [Accessed 23rd June 2016].

• NHS UK (2014) Coeliac Disease. [online] Available at: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Coeliac-disease/Pages/Introduction.aspx [Accessed 11th July 2016].

• Nutrition Facts (2016) How a gluten-free diet can be harmful. [online] Available at: http://nutritionfacts.org/2016/02/23/how-a-gluten-free-diet-can-be-harmful/ [Accessed 11th July 2016].

• British Dietetic Association (2016) Wholegrains. [online] Available at: https://www.bda.uk.com/foodfacts/wholegrains.pdf [Accessed 11th July 2016].

• Semper (2016) Mixer. [online] Available at: https://semperglutenfritt.se/produkter/Mixer# [Accessed 27th November 2016].
• Coop Medlemsservice (2016) Semper Fin Mix. [online] Electronic Conference, October. Available at: medlemsservice@coop.no [Accessed 10/10/2016].
• Kiwi Kundeservice (2016) Semper Fin Mix. [online] Electronic Conference, October. Available at: Kiwi@reply.socialboard.com [Accessed 11/10/2016].
• Joker Servicekontoret (2016) Semper Fin Mix. [online] Electronic Conference, October. Available at: joker@socialboards.com [Accessed 10/10/2016].
• Tempefilms's channel (2010) How to extract gluten from flour. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nCYhlj5Z1c [Accessed on 14th June 2016].