What common condiment contains gluten? It still surprises people when I tell them.
When I embarked on my gluten free diet, I had to start reading labels to see if gluten was hidden in some of the foods I was eating. I had heard that there were some foods that had ingredients like “natural flavors” that would send chills down the spine of celiac and others sensitive to gluten. There were also foods that no one would ever think of containing wheat. Did you know that red licorice contains wheat?
One of the foods that I had heard of earlier on was soy sauce. Did you know that it is made with wheat? Fermented soybeans, wheat, water, and salt are the main ingredients in soy sauce. So what does that translate to? No eating foods that use soy sauce or are marinated in teriyaki sauce since it contains soy sauce. There are so many foods that use teriyaki sauce!
And what about when you want to go out for sushi? How will you survive? Well, there’s really good news for soy sauce lovers – Tamari sauce. Yup, it’s made from soybeans but without wheat! I even did a blind taste test on my husband, an expert at eating sushi with plenty of soy sauce and wasabi and not even he could not tell the difference!
And the other good news is you can even buy the tamari sauce in travel packets – bring those to the sushi restaurant and you can eat the sushi!
One side note and a plug for my buddy Patrick in Moorea, Tahiti (we traveled there last year) – Patrick runs a chicken truck cooking rotisserie chicken fresh daily. But when we talked with him about purchasing some of his rotisserie chickens he mentioned that he marinates them with soy sauce. We asked him if he could cook some chickens without soy sauce on a clean skewer and utensils and he said yes! Of course we had to ask him in French first – sans soya – but then discovered that he spoke English as well. Needless to say, we bought 5 chickens during the 2 weeks we were there! They were awesome. If you ever find yourself there, say “Hi” to Patrick for Shelley.
Enjoy sushi and other foods with tamari sauce.