Kayleigh here. I won’t lie- going gluten free and trying to
stay to a budget are very rarely concepts that work well together. Especially
when you have just received the news about your new dietary restriction, all
you want to do is buy bread that is the closest in taste to the bread that you
have always eaten. You want fast food burgers, pastries, and packaged cakes and
cookies- all the things that will cost you 2-3 times more than their glutinous
counterparts, but rarely scratch that itch. So you end up buying another brand,
and another, as your wallet continues crying.
Now, Jason and I do splurge on the occasional GF bakery
lunch, or a package of English muffins or graham crackers. But we have learned
to use them as special treats and indulgences. Overall, we have found that the
best way to keep the grocery bill down is to make most of our meals with
recipes that never involved wheat in the first place. And if they do, then we
get creative and pull ideas from similar dishes to modify the approach. Below are
a few examples of how to be a savvy gluten free shopper:
1)
Use bread alternatives for sandwiches. Gluten
free loaves are often quite expensive for the amount of slices you get.
Instead, you can buy soft corn tortillas in the Hispanic foods aisle- most of
the major brands will say if they are gluten free on the label. Keep a pack in
the refrigerator, then warm them to use as wraps or toast them to use as
sandwich bread. You can also microwave a potato until soft and serve up the
ingredients as a baked potato. Or serve the sandwich fillings over a bowl of
steamy rice!
2)
Shop ethnic markets for unique alternatives. We
are lucky enough to live in an area with a massive Asian supermarket
(Uwajimaya), so we often use them as a second stop on our weekly grocery trip.
There, we can get many different varieties of noodles made of different
starches that cost no more than standard wheat pastas. It is also a great
source for inexpensive tapioca and potato starch bags, bulk white and brown
rice, and Tamari sauce (used instead of the pricey gluten free soy sauce in
supermarkets). Check Mediterranean or European markets for buckwheat groats and
chickpea flour, and see if your local Hispanic market has buns made out of
tapioca starch and cheese. While
venturing into different cuisines with packaging in different languages can
sound scary, we have had amazing success finding cheap goods in these sort of
smaller stores!
3)
Order expensive non-perishables in bulk online.
To keep things cheap, but healthy and varied, we try to buy things like quinoa,
gluten free oats, and more unusual flours online. Since bulk bins at stores
have too much of a cross-contamination risk, this is a great way of saving a
bit more money on the must-have items that can last a while in the pantry.
Or, if all else fails,
4)
Learn to love baking! Spend some time
experimenting with gluten free flours, and find some good recipes that can be
made with cheap ingredients and very little fuss. If you plan on baking often,
we find it worth the one-time pricetag to buy a breadmaker. We can bake a loaf
or two of bread when we have time on the weekend, then slice it and throw it in
the freezer. Then, during the week we can pull out a couple slices and nuke
them up to room temperature without them getting stale or moldy. If you really
want to make an investment, buy a flour mill or a blender/processor than can
grind whole grains into flour. It is usually much cheaper to buy rice, millet,
buckwheat, etc. and grind the flour yourself than it is to buy them pre-ground.
Eventually, the mill more than pays for itself!
Jason here. Learning to shop gluten free was much like
learning to shop cheaply in the first place. For me it’s all about finding
those staple foods you can cook regularly with a few core ingredients that can
be bought in bulk. Staple starch foods like Rice, Corn Tortilla’s, Potatoes,
and other starches. Once you have those in mind, you can start planning meals
around them. There are plenty of recipes online and databases you can search
given particular ingredients. Find meals that appeal to you in both taste, and
the amount of effort it will take to create them. As you find more meals, write
them down in a handy list somewhere. As the list grows you can begin to rotate
staple meals each week without feeling like you need to eat the same thing over
and over again, just to save on budget. Even now we tend to have two dinners in
rotation every week. So Monday, Wedneday, Friday we might have our Okonomiyaki,
and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday have Moffle Pizzas. That leaves us one day out
of the week where we do something special like go out to eat or make some that
takes a lot of extra preparation.
