Nardone Silvana - Silvanas gluten-free and dairy-free kitchen: timeless favorites transformed

Say Hello to Your New Gluten-Free Favorites

My daughter Kelly and I still laugh about the first time I made your bread slabs. They were supposed to accompany dinner, but they wound up being dinner. We both just sat there slathering the warm bread with butter and laughing. They were the best things we had eaten in months!
Betsy (California)

You have probably heard it a hundred times by now, but you have truly saved my family. Your cookbook and your blog have given me all the confidence in the world.
Kathy (Idaho)

In the years since my first book Cooking for Isaiah: Gluten-Free & Dairy-Free Recipes for Easy, Delicious Meals launched, along with my blog, Silvanas Kitchen, Ive been overwhelmed by the responses from moms across the country who have shared their personal stories and treasured family recipes by e-mail, blog comments, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

From the many food requests Ive received, Ive developed recipes for foods that families across America have missed because they are sensitive or allergic to gluten and dairy. Today we are all part of the new American family, where its normal for at least one family member to have a food allergy or intolerance. Through endless testing, Ive found a way to bring our favorite dishes back to the tablethe foods that we used to eat at our favorite bakeries or restaurants, that we could just grab at the supermarket or that we made all the time at home.

If you think replicate that best-selling classic.

How did I do it? After years of running the test kitchen at Every Day with Rachael Ray , owning an Italian bakery and developing recipes for major magazines like Food & Wine , Ive absorbed more than my share of culinary knowledge. Each experience has prepared me for the challenge of adapting recipes to make them gluten-freewithout sacrificing texture or flavor. Sometimes, my recipes are even better than the original. And they will satisfy the toughest critics of allyour kids.

Duplicating flavors meant spending hours reading labels on packages at the supermarket and researching how ingredientssometimes unknown to mecould improve texture. Ultimately, it involved testing and more testing in the kitchentrying one thing after another until I finally got exactly what I was after and I had re-created that memory of the long-lost dish. For six years, breads were a particular challenge. In a moment of despair, I threw in every ingredient I thought would help create the physical characteristics of a beautifully baked loafbaking powder, yeast and vitamin Cto give the dough its best chance to rise loftily. I was finally rewarded with lightness and an airy crumb.

I first joined the gluten-free community after my son, Isaiah, was diagnosed with gluten sensitivity. It took months for his doctors and me to figure out why he was constantly sick with colds, had an upset stomach, lacked energy and had dozens of warts on his hands and knees. Discovering that eliminating gluten and dairy from his dietsomething I could controlhelped his health problems changed me forever. I learned that, like Isaiah, millions of Americans cant tolerate gluten or have celiac disease, an autoimmune digestive disease that damages the small intestines and prevents nutrient absorption.

For Isaiah, acidic foods like dairy further aggravated his intestinal lining, which was already raw from the gluten sensitivity. Getting rid of dairy meant a faster recovery. Re-creating his favorite foods without dairy proved to be quite the task. For solutions, I researched other diets and cooking techniques, including raw food and molecular gastronomy, which armed me with a bunch of useful ingredients and techniques and helped me develop my own version of ).

At the time of Isaiahs diagnosis, I couldnt have predicted the number of gluten- and dairy-free products that now line our supermarket shelves and freezer sections. Gluten-free options have even popped up in some local and chain restaurants. Ultimately, however, nothing beats the comfort of a home-cooked meal, and comfort means anything that my kids enjoyed before Isaiahs diagnosis.

So, hows Isaiah doing these days? Im not a doctor, naturopath or nutritionist, but what Ive seen with my own eyes continues to inspire me. He isnt plagued with colds and doesnt need to run to the bathroom anymore after eating school lunch. Then theres his energy. Thank goodness its back. As a senior in high school who is now taller than I am, he needs all he can get. To this day, it still astonishes me that with just a little knowledge, we can make dishes that have the power to help our bodies heal themselves.