I am not sensitive to gluten, as my previous books attest. However, neither am I immune to the dietary challenges brought about by the passionate consumption of products made with wheat, as anyone who has seen me also knows. There was a time when I was lean and mean, and then I opened a bakery and began a love affair with bread products of all types. Back in 1971, when I was twenty-one, I participated in a communally operated vegetarian restaurant in Boston in which no white flour, white sugar, or white rice was permitted to cross the threshold. I read everything I could find on nutrition and various popular food philosophies of the time, such as macrobiotics, raw foods and sprouts, wheat grass therapy, food combining, and juicing. I even met Jack LaLanne, one of my personal fitness heroes. For three years I ate only organically grown food and unrefined whole grains, and all of my childhood allergies and food sensitivities seemed to fade away. At five feet six inches, I weighed a lithe 136 pounds and felt great. At the end of those three years we sold the restaurant and everyone moved on, and in the next phase of my journey, I once again became an omnivore.
Even as my weight gradually increased, I maintained excellent health, which I attributed to those three dynamic years of immersion in a healthful lifestyle. By the time my wife, Susan, and I opened our own restaurant and bakery in 1986, I weighed 155 pounds and had become stocky. When we sold the business seven years later, I was up to 165 pounds and would have been heavier were it not for the daily, physically intense work of baking thousands of loaves of bread, which helped me burn off a lot of calories.
As soon as I stepped out of daily production and transitioned into teaching at culinary schools and writing books, I started gaining more weight—and quickly. The accumulated effects of tasting glorious white-flour breads of all types, along with access to the handiwork of fabulous chefs and restaurants to which I lost all ability to say no, caused my weight to balloon to over 200 pounds. Searching for the perfect pizza as I researched my book American Pie didn’t help either, but I sure was having fun! Fortunately, I never stopped working out, so even though I was, to put it bluntly, fat, it was firm fat, marbled with muscle. Nonetheless, it was cause for concern, especially that most pernicious of fats: belly fat. So recently, with Susan’s encouragement, I decided it was time to get serious about losing weight.
I had already met Denene Wallace a few years earlier at a private tasting of some of her gluten-free products and was impressed with how good they were. Gluten sensitivity is a subject I had been tracking since 1991, shortly after my first book, Brother Juniper’s Bread Book, came out. Around that time, Loree Starr Brown, who had been a regular customer at Brother Juniper’s Bakery, came in one day with a box of homemade breads and muffins based on the recipes in my book, but all made with rice flour instead of wheat flour. They were delicious. Loree proceeded to educate me about celiac disease, a medical condition that nearly killed her before it was finally diagnosed and treated by removing all traces of gluten from her diet.
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