Gluten Free Quick Oats and Gluten Free Oat Flour are produced from high quality, gluten free oats.

We are more than delighted to announce that we are now producing Gluten Free Quick Cooking Rolled Oats and Gluten Free Whole Grain Oat Flour. Both of these new products are produced from the highest quality gluten free oats grown on dedicated oat-growing fields by a cooperative of 200 farms. Each farm delivery is sampled many times and tested with an R5 ELISA gluten test to ensure the absence of gluten.

Our gluten free customers have found our Gluten Free Old Fashioned Rolled Oats and Gluten Free Steel Cut Oats to be a welcome addition to their diet and have not hesitated to share this with us. While some people with celiac disease may not tolerate even the purest of oats, many of our customers have enjoyed these heart-healthy additions to their morning routine.

Not only do oats add a wonderful nutritional boost, they also open up a realm of baking that was previously hard to replicate using the products available in the marketplace- oatmeal cookies, granola, muesli, the possibilities are endless with gluten free oats. Adding gluten free quick oats and gluten free oat flour only opens up more possibilities!

To celebrate these new additions to our gluten free line, we’ve partnered with Carol Fenster to bring you an awesome giveaway. Carol was a huge advocate for bringing these products to you, so we’re giving away 10 autographed copies of Carol’s beautiful 1000 Gluten Free Recipes. To sweeten the pot, we’re adding a package of gluten free oat flour and gluten free quick oats for each of our 10 winners.

Gluten Free Oat Flour is a wonderful way to add the nutrition of oats into your gluten free baking.

How to enter:

Please read this carefully or you may not be counted in the giveaway. You must complete number one to be entered, but you have more chances to win by completing the additional entry tasks.

1. To be entered you MUST do this: Leave a comment on this blog post and tell us what you would make using Gluten Free Quick Oats. This must be done at www.bobsredmill.com/blog.

Additional Entries:

1 Entry: Visit Carol Fenster’s site, Savory Palate, and locate Carol’s Culinary Cues and sign up for her newsletter. THEN, report back to the blog and tell us that you subscribed.

1 Entry: Become a friend of Carol Fenster on Facebook . THEN, report back to the blog and tell us that you did.

1 Entry: Become a friend of Bob’s Red Mill on Facebook. THEN, report back to the blog and tell us that you did.

Carol Fenster's book is a beautiful collection of 1000 recipes for every occasion.

1 Entry: As a friend of Bob’s Red Mill on facebook, post a message on our wall and tell us why you want to win.

1 Entry: Follow us on Twitter (@bobs_red_mill). THEN report back to the blog and tell us that you did.

1 Entry: If you have a blog or website, post about this contest and link back to our blog. THEN report back to our blog and tell us that you did.

Don’t forget to return to the blog to tell us what you did to earn extra entries. The contest ends on 04/30/10 at midnight. Winners will be announced on 05/03/10.

04/02: UPDATE: Since so many of you are already friends of ours on Facebook or following us on Twitter, just leave a comment that you’re already doing this and we’ll still count it as an entry.

A few weeks ago, while flipping through a magazine, I came across a great interview with Jamie Oliver about his then soon-to-be-released show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Most of us know Jamie from his past life as the Naked Chef and stints on the Food Network. I was impressed by the passion with which he talked about food, real food, and how badly he wanted to help Americans eat better.

Jamie's Food Revolution airs Fridays on ABC.

Fast forward to Friday night and as I’m looking for something to watch I come across two episodes of Food Revolution. It only took me a few minutes to become deeply engrossed in this show. It broke my heart to see how people responded to Jamie’s attempts at changing the way we look at food. I was flat-out appalled at what is considered a healthy lunch for elementary school kids. I can understand the backlash to change that Jamie faces and I hope that he perseveres to lead our schools and our communities to healthier eating. What seems to be a big challenge is encouraging children to make new, healthier choices. Change starts at home. Parents can teach healthy eating habits by example and create a life-long love of good food by getting children involved in meal preparation. Teach children about where their food comes from and how to use it.

If you have not seen the show, I recommend checking it out. To learn more about this show and Jamie’s Food Revolution, please check out Jamie’s site. He has a chosen a very difficult challenge and we at Bob’s Red Mill applaud his efforts. Together with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, Jamie’s mission is to reverse the statistic that this generation of children will be the first to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents (source).

Bob’s Red Mill has been very pleased to be finding new customers from the food service industry looking for whole grains to add to their school lunch programs. Most of these have been from colleges around the country and we hope to see more customers in the elementary school sectors. Be the voice of change and demand for healthier foods in your child’s school. If enough of us want to change, change will happen. Jamie has started a petition for change on his site. He will present this petition to the president after his show airs to demonstrate how many Americans want to make this change. If you want to get involved in this movement, or sign the petition, you can do so here.

Quinoa Salad by Chef Pascal Sauton is one of our long standing favorite recipes (link below).

Our friends at the Whole Grains Council kicked off 2010 with their clever Grain of the Month Calendar, a plan to honor an individual grain each month of the year. March is Quinoa month and we thought it might be a good time for a refresher course on the nutritional powerhouse known as quinoa.

Quinoa (pronounced KEEN-WA) is a high protein grain cultivated by the Incan tribes of the Andes mountains in South America. A traditional staple of the Incan diet, quinoa was known as the mother of all grains or chisaya mama. Because the native peoples of South America held the grain in such high regards, it was scorned by Spanish conquerers and fell into obscurity until a revival of the grain in the 1970s.

Lucky for us that the grain did find its way into the kitchens of 1970s America. Not only is it delicious, but quinoa has a short cooking time which sets it apart from many whole grains. Unlike many other whole grains, quinoa cooks in just 15 minutes! This tiny , gluten-free grain delivers all of the essential amino acids and is a good source of dietary fiber, phosphorus and iron.  People often talk about the bitter saponins in the seed coat of quinoa. Bob’s Red Mill quinoa has been pre-washed to remove this bitter coating. There are other brands that are not pre-washed, so be sure to check the label before consuming or you’ll be unpleasantly surprised. When cooked, quinoa is light and fluffy and has a very unique look. If you look very closely, you can see a lighter ring attached to the grain- this is quite simply the germ. It looks a little bit worm-like and is most noticeable on the black and red quinoa, but rest assured this is normal.

You can almost make out the little golden circles in this picture. These circles are the germ of the grain.

I’ve noticed quinoa on the menu at several of our local restaurants and in deli salads at places like Whole Foods- next time you see that funny q-word, see if you can sample some, you might just fall in love with this tiny grain.

If you’re not sure what to do with quinoa, we have some fabulous recipes on our website and you can get more info (we particularly liked their fun facts) and recipes for quinoa from the Whole Grains Council.

Here are some of our favorite recipes using quinoa:

Quinoa Salad (Pascal Sauton)
Quinoa Taboule
Roasted Winter Vegetables with Quinoa
Tuscan Quinoa Radicchio Wraps
Black Bean, Corn and Quinoa Salad

Irish Soda Bread combines simple ingredients and makes them sing.

At our house, we don’t need an extra excuse to indulge in Irish Soda Bread. As it stands, it’s all we can do to not eat the whole loaf in one day. Our Irish Soda Bread Mix was one of the first products I fell in love with when I began working at Bob’s Red Mill over five years ago.  Traditional soda bread was made using flour, baking soda, salt and buttermilk; simple ingredients available to most families during the mid-1800s. Sodium Bicarbonate (baking soda) was introduced to Ireland around 1840 and became popular for its reliability in leavening and affordability. According to Rory O’Connell (via Epicurious), the introduction of baking soda allowed families to bake bread without an oven, something which many families simply did not have. Soda bread could bake in a covered cast iron pot set directly on the coals of a fire. Soda was not perishable like yeast and it was very affordable for the average family. Most farms would have been making their own butter (of which buttermilk is a byproduct) and growing wheat to feed their families. Soda bread allowed them to bake bread using the simple ingredients readily available in their lives.

The Irish soda bread we see in bakeries across the United States is a far cry from the simple peasant bread of the 1850s. Raisins and other dried fruit would have been a luxury item, according to O’Connell, and added to breads during harvest as a treat for the men working in the fields. The most common soda bread was a whole meal (or brown) bread. This makes sense, white flour was simply not a common ingredient for most households and did not become readily available for consumption until the early 1900s.

There are many modern variations on this simple staple and I’ve included some below. The bread is easy; it takes almost no time to throw together and yields a lovely loaf with little effort. The key to a nice loaf of soda bread is to handle the dough as little as possible. The more you handle the dough, the tougher the loaf will become. If you’re looking for a quick fix, try our Irish Soda Bread Mix; it’s simple, easy and quite tasty.

Irish Soda Bread Recipes:
Traditional Irish Soda Bread using white flour from Baking Bites.
Grammy’s Irish Brown Bread from Bitten Blog
Irish Brown Soda Bread from DoChara
Gluten Free Irish Soda Bread from Carol Fenster, PhD
Gluten Free Irish Soda Bread from Gluten-Free Goddess, Karina Allrich
Irish Soda Bread with Raisins and Caraway from Epicurious
Not-so-traditional Irish Soda Bread with Dark Chocolate and Candied Organic Peel from Epicurious

Read the full interview with Rory O’Connell on MSNBC.

It is a question that more and more people are asking about the products they buy.  It can also be a difficult question to answer when you’re trying to pick out what to take home from the grocery store. At Bob’s Red Mill, we have found that the people who enjoy quality food are often the same people who want to know that their food is being produced in a safe and responsible way.

Photo 1: Bob in the field

Let’s face it, some of those foods on the grocery store shelves today look like they might have come straight from outer space. When you look at the packages, it is hard to imagine what kind of plant or animal these foods originally came from, much less pronounce half of the words listed as ingredients.

At Bob’s Red Mill, we like to keep our ingredients lists short and simple. Our straightforward clear packaging lets you see what you’re getting the moment you pick up the bag. We really mean it when we say that “You Can See Our Quality”.

Because we don’t disguise the products we sell with complicated treatments and chemicals, finding the best possible growers of what we mill is critical to our success. We tirelessly search for top quality product, and are always on the lookout for growers using the best possible farming practices. Sending our experts into the fields to see things first hand is just one of the ways we ensure quality and build relationships with our suppliers.

Photo 2: Roger in the field

In the following three pictures you’ll see Bob Moore the president, Roger our Quality Control Lab Technician, and Neil our Purchasing Manager, getting out in the field visiting some of our crops in the ground.

Now for the contest! We’re giving away a gift pack containing four of our favorite products using those ingredients to five lucky winners who can correctly name the crops pictured.

Photo 3: Roger and Neil in the field

How to enter: Just email us before 5 p.m. PST on March 10 at marketing@bobsredmill.com with the correct answers and put “Crops” in the subject line. We will pick five winners at random from those who can correctly identify the crops.

Photo 4: Roger and Niel in the field