I’ve been posting quite a few seitan recipes lately and whenever I post pictures of my faux meat experiments online, I notice someone always mentions that they don’t like to eat gluten, the main ingredient in seitan.

Of course, some people do have celiac disease, and others have non-celiac gluten sensitivity (a very real disease). According to Dr. Greger, however, those people amount to a very small segment of the population. For the rest of us, gluten is apparently not only fine but actually good for us!

Check out Dr. G’s short video on the topic!

And while Dr. Greger refers to the less than one percent of the population with celiac disease, he fails to mention people who suffer from non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS). This oversight may be related to the fact that science has only recently started studying NCGS and his video is from 2009. Still, to assume that because ingesting gluten can be life-threatening to a small portion of the population it must be bad for everyone is illogical. By that flawed logic, we should all stop eating nuts because a small segment of the population has a nut allergy.

But what about the myriad gluten-free products now available in supermarkets and specialty bakeries? Well, apparently, it’s a bit of a scam: gluten-free products are often over-priced and some may be less healthy than their gluten-filled counterpart.

Check out this episode of Marketplace called “Gluten-Free: The Truth Behind the Trend” for details.

So what is gluten? It’s what we call the proteins in wheat, rye, spelt and barley. It’s what makes bread rise and what makes loaves retain their structure. Some people have a disease that makes them intolerant to this protein, but it’s just fine for the rest of us!

Aaaand I just realized after watching this video that I use all-purpose flour for my baguettes, yet I should be using bread flour, which has a higher protein content. Perhaps I’ll add a little vital wheat gluten to my next batch to increase the protein content (and, hopefully, reduce the density of the loaves).

Anyway, here is the process for my vegan beef dip!

This succulent sammie was created by first making Gaz Oakley’s recipe for Vegan Roast Beast au jus. I then baked a couple of baguettes using the pan de agua method, so the crusts were nice and soft. I then thinned out the gravy from the roast beast recipe to make it more conducive to dipping! Finally, I sliced the faux beef with the food processor so it would be SUPER thin.

I schmeared the soft little baguettes with lots of horseradish and a touch of vegan butter and loaded them up with the warmed faux beef and sliced onions and Bob’s your uncle–a totally vegan beef dip served with air fries!

And here’s the sammie going into the jus!!

And the song of the day is Fleetwood Mac’s “Blood on the Floor.”

I recently discovered that Fleetwood Mac is coming to Vancouver and was trying to compel Em to attend the concert because….I sang a Fleetwood Mac song the entire time I was in labour with her. That song was, appropriately enough, “Blood on the Floor”! And while it’s a grim little song about heartbreak and murder, it has a perfect kind of rhythm–one perfectly suited to the rhythmic painful rocking of labour.

I don’t think I convinced her.