Udi's Gluten Free Foods: White Sandiwch Bread

Bread is such a wonderful, versatile thing.  When I lived in Japan, a lot of people said to me, "Why don't you just eat rice?"  But there's not a whole lot you can do with rice, especially the sticky Japanese rice (I kept looking for long grain for crock pot meals, but couldn't find it).  You can put it in a bowl and put something on it.  You can make an onigiri.  Onigiri require a lot of preparation, since you have to make the rice and form it into balls with something.  (I didn't have a rice cooker.)  Just eating something on rice, more often than not, requires heating.  At work we generally did not have a microwave, and I'm not a fan of the "soggy, cold bento."

But bread!  Pop it in the toaster and make toast.  Or make a sandwich.  Or put a little peanut butter on it.  And there are lots of hot and cold options.  Because of the lack of a microwave, all I really wanted was a nice, cold sandwich to stick in my bag and eat at work.  But all the bread I had required toasting or otherwise heating it to make it not be like munching on a big, rubbery, dry slice of crumbliness.

And then there was Udi.

I saw this when I was in Vim & Vigor, a health food/supplement shop in the Ala Moana Center between Foodland and the post office.  I had missed it the first time I looked for it, but once I found it I was surprised that it had a pretty decent selection of gluten free foods, such as cereal, bread, cookies, biscotti, and a few frozen items.  They had the Food For Life bread, some Kinnikinnick, and then Udi's.

I had already gotten tired of Ener-G, so I thought I would give another brand a try.  Udi's claimed I did not need to refrigerate or freeze the bread, which was HUGELY appealing.  So basically I would just need to take it home, let it thaw, and eat it.

The first test was the end piece.  It wasn't even really a piece.  It was a strip of crust that they left on there for some reason.  It was interesting because it tasted like something I'd eaten before.  I wasn't sure what, and it took me a short while to figure it out.  But I did a test with some peanut butter and found that it was a tiny bit dry (yeah, well, whatever) but otherwise very good and the most normal bread I've had so far.  Not mushy like the breads I had in Japan, not crumbly like the Gluten Free Pantry mix, not rubbery and dense like the Ener-G breads.  It was just good.

It occurred to me later what it tasted like.  In Japan I could get some "baguettes" that were sold in convenience stores or supermarkets and were really cheap.  Not very high quality or baguette-like, but if I wanted a sandwich at midnight and didn't want the fluffy, shortening-ful squares of white pillow-bread, they did the trick.  That's what the Udi's bread tastes like.  Cheap, fake baguettes.  Which isn't a bad thing.  Cheap, fake baguettes have their place in the world.  And they are real bread, which is a great thing to taste like.