'Yes! You Can' Gluten Free Bread
In our search for the best free-from bread we finally located a loaf of 'Yes! You Can' in a local supermarket. So it was with some excitement that we bought it to taste test - to see if it really does mean that 'Yes! We Can'. Advertised as 'Gluten free... and Tasty' our first impressions were very good as we took possession of a 'larger than most' sized loaf, that felt soft to touch.
But what about the contents...
It is clearly marked on the packaging that this is a gluten, wheat and dairy free loaf so negates the need to scour through the ingredient list but, similar to most people on a restricted diet, we still do. The package slogan reads: -
Just because you're eating gluten free bakery products we don't think you should have to forgo the delicious taste and texture of fresh, well baked bread. That's why we have developed the YES! YOU CAN range - gluten free but tasting just the way bread should!
Inside the packaging the bread feels very soft and fresh to touch and we are struck by the fact that it also smells like 'real' bread when we open the cellophane. But as fresh bread it tastes like an average value loaf and wasn't very suitable for freshly made sandwiches, as is the norm for a lot of free-from bread. So we proceeded to toast it to see how it performs. Unfortunately, if you want slices of toast, this may not be the bread for you. A few slices emerged nearly complete and intact and made some very satisfactory tasting toast. It crisps up well and browns evenly in the oldest of toaster and doesn't flop once it cools.
On the whole, over half of the loaf is left in pieces and will make a great bread and butter pudding - or be ideal for dipping into soups and stews but will never go into a toaster or make a fresh bread sandwich. As with many of the free-from breads available, we found that the larger loaves rarely stay together in whole slices and you end up with expensive pieces of fragile bread, that are not suitable for the use intended. So would we buy this again? Maybe.
It does have a good nutrition balance and calorie count per slice in comparison to some of the other free-from loaves on the market. And if we thought we had just picked up a loaf that slipped under the quality control checks then we may be persuaded to part with a fair chunk of money to re-test another loaf. But, as we suspect, we may just have experienced the same quality of loaf that we have encountered so often in our search for the 'best free-from bread'. If you want to explore the range or try it yourself visit www.robertsbakery.co.uk/yesyoucan