Hateful Tortillas

Today I tried some gluten/dairy-free tortilla wraps from the Love More brand:

They can be considered thick flat breads or thin pancakes, but not tortillas.

That made them too brittle---even when heated. (If they required an alternative form of heating, such as steaming, it didn't say on the package.)

Which made them useless for wrapping anything. Even just bending them slightly caused them to break.

They tasted like rice pancakes, not tortillas. (The first ingredients are "water, tapioca starch, rice flour, wholegrain maize flour".) There's nothing wrong with the taste of rice, but rice flour is dense. And these things were very dense. One of these will fill you up.

I don't recommend using these for tortillas or wraps. Maybe as a base for mini-pizzas or quesadillas.

I also don't understand what marketing genius came up with the brand name, "free from foods". I like food, and don't want to be "free" from it.

On a positive note, in April I posted a review of good tortillas, and where they can be found in Edinburgh.

Where to find soft corn tortillas in Edinburgh

If you like making your own tacos/burritos/quesadillas/etc, it's hard to find soft corn (maize) tortillas. The soft "corn" tortillas in most supermarkets have wheat. (The supermarkets usually have hard corn taco shells, though.)

I recently found that Lupe Pinto's has soft corn tortillas, from the Cool Chile Company in London. They come frozen in packs of a dozen, and contain (according to the list of ingredients) "stoneground maize (trace of lime), water, CMC, guar gum". (CMC is Carboxymethylcellulose, used as a firming agent and preservative, as well as a gluten substitute.)

The tortillas are good. Importantly, they are not brittle, so don't need to be steamed before using. They heat up well in a frying pan or Foreman grill.

Lupe Pinto's also has hard shell corn tortillas, and a lot of other Mexican and North American foods and spices.

According to Cool Chili's web site, the tortillas are gluten-free.

UPDATE (20 July 2011): Real Foods tell me that they have three brands of gluten-free torilla chips. (I'm unsure if they just mean chips vs soft tortillas, and I've not yet checked it myself.)

It's a good bet that you'll find gluten-free tortillas in a other natural/whole-food stores in town.