The Gluten-Free Staples I Always Keep in My Kitchen

One of the biggest questions I hear from people who are new to gluten-free living is this. What should I actually keep in my kitchen? When you first go gluten-free, it can feel like everything you used to buy is suddenly off limits. 

But the truth is, once you know your staples, cooking gluten-free becomes much easier. Today I am sharing the gluten-free staples I always keep in my kitchen. These are the ingredients that make quick meals possible and keep our house running smoothly during busy weeks.

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Transcript

Safety Note And The Core Question

Carrie Saunders 0:00

Quick reminder before we get started on this episode. This podcast is based on my personal experiences and isn't medical advice. One of the biggest questions I hear from people who are new to gluten-free living is this. What should I actually keep in my kitchen? When you first go gluten-free, it can feel like everything you used to buy is suddenly off limits. But once you know your staples, cooking gluten-free becomes much easier. Today I'm sharing the gluten-free staples I always keep in my kitchen. These are their ingredients that make quick meals possible and keep our house running smoothly during busy weeks. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Gluten Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, Kiri Saunders. In 2011, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a moment that changed everything. But I was determined not to let it hold me back. With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer the gluten-free lifestyle, breaking down recipes, safety tips, travel hacks, and everything in between to rebuild a life I love. Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance, or simply choose to live gluten-free, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we simplify the gluten-free lifestyle, make it fun, and prove that you don't have to miss out on anything. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about gluten-free staples that I always keep in my kitchen. So, why do these staples matter in a gluten-free kitchen? Gluten-free cooking becomes easier when you have reliable ingredients on hand. You don't have to reinvent meals every week. It can really loosen that decision fatigue. And staples reduce stress and make grocery shopping easier. Once you know the ingredients you trust, cooking gluten-free becomes a lot less overwhelming. And it just will get better. So if you're new or newerish, you know, only a few years into gluten-free living, it will get better. Just, you know, make it simple, listen to the tips on the podcast, and it'll get better. So, what are some of my gluten-free pantry staples? I want to talk about first those. So I like to always have a gluten-free flour on hand. I usually keep the Bob's Red Mill one-to-one in our household. There are some other really great one-to-one flowers. Uh, King Arthur's also a really great one. Uh, Pamela's is also another good brand. Um, I've just stuck with Bob's Red Mill. It's something that I started with and something that I just know. Now I do get the one-to-one, so that's the rice flour base, not the bean flour base. The bean flour base, which is what I tried when I first went gluten-free. Not really recommended for most things for that. So do use the one-to-one flour that will generally replace normal flour in recipes really easily. You can use it for baking, you can use it for thickening sauces, you can use it for coating food foods before cooking if you like to do that. Now, one of the things that I also keep is basamati rice. Um, for some reason, basamati that style just goes better in my stomach. I'm not sure why, but I love to have this one around and I kind of like the texture of it better than normal rice. So, what I generally do, and I actually just did this last night, is I cooked extra rice while we were already having some rice with marmeal. And then I keep that in an airtight, you know, container in the fridge. It can last for about a week in the fridge in an airtight container, and then all you have to do is stick, you know, some of that in a bowl, add a little bit of water to your bowl, and cover it and put it in the microwave for like a minute or two, and you've got fresh steamed rice back again. So it's really great for quick lunches as a side or even a second dinner. So I'd love to, you know, cook ahead basamati rice to just make our lives easier later in the week. We also keep gluten-free pasta in our pantry all the time. We usually keep the burilla brand or the ronzoni brand. Um, Jovial is also another brand that you will find in our pantry. Kind of depends on what we're using it for. So the burilla, um, we usually like to use the rotini. We love to use that to make our homemade mac and cheese in an Instapot or the pressure cooker, whatever you have. We have actually a paper chef version of it. Um, and it just makes quick, quick mac and cheese. You can have mac and cheese homemade in about 10 minutes, just depends upon how fast your pressure cooker heats up and it's five minutes to cook. Um, and it's a great way to have some, you know, other uh carb in your you know pantry that can is easy to cook. Uh, we love the Jovial brand more for spaghetti style sauce. Uh, I do much better as I talk on the podcast on a grain-free diet, and they have a Kossava flour um pasta that's more for spaghetti sauce. Oh, there's another brand of pasta that's also really great, and that's bonsa. That's made from chickpea flour, and it actually is really good and has a pretty good texture. Now, it does operate a little bit different than a rice um corn quinoa based pasta, which is what the gorilla in the ronzoni is. Um, it will create a foam on top, so just note that that you're supposed to skim that off. But it does a really good job of being a great uh gluten-free substitute pasta. Now, you can also have canned beans in your pantry. This is a great staple that you know takes years and years to go bad. It's great to use for taco nights. Uh, if you love to have added beans to like your salad, uh, can make a quick side dish. It's a great way to add some extra protein and fiber to your meals. We usually also have um, you know, like a kind of like a taco kit in our pantry, too. So we usually keep the siete hard shell tacos and or their almond or cossava flour um tortillas in our freezer. We keep those in our freezer in the um green-free hard shell tacos just in the pantry. Those are great for making taco night really easy. They also have a taco mix that you can buy, a powdery mix that you can just, you know, brown your ground beef, add a little bit of water, add this mixture, and warm that part up after you browned your, you know, brown and drained your ground beef, and boom, you have tacos. So it just makes it so much easier. Now I can't unfortunately use that mixture anymore because it has tomatoes in it, and I'm also sensitive to tomatoes. But before I found that mixture, I was already hand-making my own taco seasoning with just um spices. So I'm back to doing that again. Another staple is to have peanut butter if you can have peanut butter or almond butter if you can't have uh peanut butter, but you can have almonds. Those are great for quick breakfasts. I use the almond butter every morning for on my toast for breakfast. It's great for snacks. You can add it to your smoothies, you know, some sort of peanut butter or nut butter if your family can do nuts or peanuts. It's a great, you know, protein and fat um staple to have in your house for you know a quick snack or a quick meal. Now we always have, of course, gluten-free bread in our house. Canyon Bakehouse's our current favorite bread right now. It is a really good toasting bread, it's a really good French toast bread. It is also great for sandwiches. It is a little bit on the drier side, so you have to be okay with having a little bit drier bread. Um, but I feel like it's a decent balance between a dry and a soft bread. Um, and it doesn't have soy in it, so it's one of the reasons why we tend to go towards it. Shower bread is also very good. This is the one I'm currently using um for breakfast myself because it doesn't have brown rice as the first ingredient, and I'm trying to stay away from brown rice right now. I just feel better. So those are the two brands we usually use for uh breads. Uh Udi's is also very good. I haven't had it in a while. It's uh a little less available than it used to be when I was first gluten-free, but it was that was our staple go-to bread when we were first gluten-free. Now, what I do with the bread though is, you know, you guys will probably know if you went to go buy gluten-free bread, it's expensive and the loaf is super small. So, what we do is whenever we find the gluten-free, our favorite gluten-free bread on sale, we will buy extra of it and then we will stick it in our freezer. And then all you have to do is when you're getting low on your loaf of bread, so you only have a slice or two, you know, left, take one out of the freezer and set it on the counter, and it'll thaw by the next day, and you won't even know that you froze it. At least with the Canyon Bakehouse bread, this works wonders. We also use the Canyon Breakhouse um hamburger buns, which I mentioned before. So, what I do is those are partially sliced when you get them home. Um, so I fully slice them, put them back in the bag, and then put them in the freezer. That makes it easy for me to pop out just one hamburger bun and um put it in our toaster oven to thaw it and toast it at the same time. So then you're not worrying about ruining or you know, the other buns that are in the bag if you don't eat all of them at once. Now, some refrigerator staples are things that you would have had before even going gluten-free. So, eggs, they're great for breakfast, they're great for baking, they're great for quick meals, um, you know, breakfast for dinner. So if you tolerate eggs, that's a really great staple to have. Cheese is also great, it adds flavor and protein to many dishes. If you um are processing dairy fine, some celiacs and gluten-intolerant people do not process dairy very well, especially at first when they're first healing. So do note that and be careful with that. And obviously, too much cheese is really not good for us, but it's darn tasty if you can't eat it. Um, and then salsa is something that we usually have in our house. It's great for taco night. If you can tolerate tomatoes, most people can. I'm one of those oddballs that can't. Um, people love to put it on their eggs. I hear I've never done that in my entire life, but I know that's something I've seen people do. You can also use it in rice bowls, so you can make kind of knockoff rice bowls from some fast food places and add that um salsa to it. And then, of course, we always have butter in the house. Um, there's also some really good non-dairy butter. Um, the VO life is something we've used before. It's soy free and dairy-free. And my husband's actually really enjoyed that one. He thought it was really good. We also keep gluten-free sauces around, marinara, you know, coconut aminos, um, hot sauces. So just look for other sauces that can really add some quick flavor to your meals. There's plenty of barbecue sauces out there that are gluten-free. Um, Primal Kitchen is a whole brand that's gluten-free. Um, they have lots of really good sauces. Um, we love the Tessame Ranch. That's a really good ranch. I kind of thought of Tessame because uh Primal Kitchen also has salad dressings, but my favorite is the Tessame Ranch that is dairy-free as well as gluten-free, and they don't add any sugar to it. So it's it's a really nice, clean um dressing. And then in our refrigerator, we also always have our snowville creamer milk. It's a minimally processed milk. It's so much easier on my stomach. It's made from grass-fed cows. I do so much better on grass-fed, and I should have mentioned on the butter. We use Kerry Gold butter because that's grass-fed as well. It's so much easier on my stomach. So if you're one that you think that you might be able to tolerate some dairy, but it kind of gives you trouble sometimes. I would recommend trying raw or grass-fed um dairy to see if that helps you. I kind of squirreled there for a little bit, but I wanted to mention that because sometimes grass-fed, we can tolerate a celiacs more than we can conventional milk and dairy. So let's go back to the milk and coconut milk. We always have milk and coconut milk in our house. We, like I said, we have the Snowville creamery, which is kind of local to our area, um, kind of over the whole state of Ohio, but it's a really great minimally processed milk. And then we have the coconut milk for smoothies. Um, we absolutely love to use unsweetened coconut milk in our smoothies. You can't really taste it. It gives you some um, you know, fluid that you need to create that smoothie. And then the taste of the berries just really pop because there's nothing covering it up. And then let's talk freezer staples. We kind of touched on this somewhere. I've talked about how I put some of the items I buy in the freezer. Um, but we always have like frozen ground beef in our freezer. We actually buy a quarter of a cow regularly from a local um farm here, and it's grass-fed, which is a bonus for me since I do much better on grass-fed beef as well. Um, I mentioned I do much better on grass-fed dairy, but I do really well on grass-fed beef. I don't do well on conventional beef. So that's great for taco night because you can just thaw that in the microwave, partially thaw it, and then go brown it on your cooktop, and you've basically, you know, have fresh ground beef right there. It's also great for burgers. You can pre-patty any ground beef you get and put them in between in between wax peper and put them in your freezer. So that's quick. Um, you can make spaghetti out of this. You it's just a great quick meal if you tolerate beef. You can also substitute this with ground chicken or ground turkey if you prefer. We usually also keep some frozen shrimp in our freezer, some um uncooked frozen shrimp. It's great. It cooks quickly. We just put it in a colander to thaw it, you know, while we're preparing the other parts of the dish before we cook it, since they cook so fast. And it's really great because it cooks fast, high protein, low fat, and it can really save you some meal time. We also always have frozen sausage, it's useful for breakfast or dinner. Uh, my youngest child uh loves to eat uh a sandwich, breakfast sandwich. So we'll get a Canyon Bake House um, the everything bagel. I have some really good bagels too. I did mention that. Everything bagel. Uh, toast that up while we are cooking two frozen sausage patties um at the same time, and then we'll do an egg uh scrambled in a little mini pan, a little mini egg pan, and we will make him a breakfast sandwich that way, or he will do it himself. We usually also keep frozen chicken. So the theme here, you know, keep you know, frozen meats that you can easily thaw, frozen steaks. These things usually will still thaw in a day or two in your meat drawer. And then we usually have frozen pizza against the grainers our absolute favorite frozen pizza. It has the best crust, it is green-free. You do have to be able to tolerate dairy, obviously, because it's pizza, but it also has cheese in the crust, so note that too. They have a pesto pizza, which I'm not a huge pesto fan, but it is really good. And I can eat it since it doesn't have marinara sauce on it. And then they have a really good pepperoni pizza. They might also have some other flavors, but those are the two flavors we have here in our town. And then we love the Alexia frozen uh fries, potato puffs. Um, they have waffle fries too. We love to have those as a nice quick side in our freezer, and we grab those up when those are on sale. And then we always have frozen fruit because my husband loves to make smoothies. I actually love to use the frozen sliced strawberries, and I will put them in a small little bowl and warm them up in the microwave every morning, and I put that on my almond butter toast. So that's my jelly for my toast. It was a trick I got from a nutritionist back in 2021 when I was working on losing a lot of weight, and it really is pretty darn tasty. And then that way you don't have to worry about strawberries going bad in your fridge, and they're always available. So I love to have that. And then a treat we love to have in our uh freezer is Kat's frozen garlic toast. Oh my gosh, this stuff is so delicious, and it is their their food, uh Kat's brand is really good. We've tried a lot of their stuff, it is more on the treat version of food, so I will warn you there. They have like Pop Tarts and donuts and you know, some really good yummy so we will treat ourselves to that. But one of the steeples of theirs that we keep in our freezer is the garlic toast. It's just, it's just delicious. I mean, I can't even I've tried to make garlic toast this good. It's hard to make garlic toast right because you just got to get the garlic butter just right and on a thick piece of toast. So it just works great because it's already made for you and they use that nice thick piece of toast that you want. And then that kind of goes into this next section I have for you is I do try to focus on simpler foods when possible. So try to avoid those highly processed gluten-free foods, they're not any better for you, other than not having gluten in them, than the highly processed gluten version of the food. So, you know, even though I love the Cats brand, it's not something we keep in our house all the time because it's generally almost everything is sugary and it's pretty processed. I do think that it's a great quality for you know the type of food it is. Um, I'm pretty I'm very confident in the brand from that, you know, realm. I, you know, I do love their products, they're really tasty and stuff, but I do try to focus on my health because when we're gluten-free, we need to make sure we're getting the vitamins and minerals we need as well as supporting our nutrition and our body. So I try to avoid the highly processed foods and look at them as a treat. So, as a recap on as a closing to this episode, I want to encourage you that if you are new to gluten-free living, start by building a small list of staples you trust. The ones I've listed in here, I've built over, you know, almost 15 years now. You do not need to buy everything at once, just focus on a handful of ingredients and make simple meals possible. And this will get easier every every day. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gluten Free Engineer. If you found value in this story, please share it with someone who might need encouragement on their own gluten-free journey. For more tips, recipes, resources, and even links to my YouTube channel, head on over to theglutenfreengineer.com. It's your one-stop hub to make gluten-free living simple, fun, and full of flavor. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on an episode. And we will see you next week. The Gluten Free Engineer Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I share my personal experiences and stories about living with celiac disease and navigating a gluten free lifestyle. This podcast does not provide medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for medical questions, concerns, or advice specific to your health.