Sometimes you just can't make it into the kitchen to cook. Dr. Gourmet has reviewed over 1,000 common convenience foods, ingredients, and restaurant selections so that you know what's worth eating - and what's not. View the Index of all Dr. Gourmet's Food Reviews
Just Tell Me What to Eat!
The Delicious 6-Week Weight Loss Plan for the Real World
Timothy S. Harlan, MD, FACP has counseled thousands of his patients on healthy, sustainable weight loss. Now he's compiled his best tips and recipes into a six-week plan for you to learn how to eat great food that just happens to be great for you.
Get the prescription for better health as well as healthy weight loss, including:
What to eat
How to cook it
When to eat it
What to eat at a restaurant
What to eat if you're in a hurry
and best of all....
Why eating great food is the best health decision you'll ever make.
Frozen Gluten Free Muffins Achieve Normalcy
Breakfast is a challenge for lots of folks. Back when I was first working on what became The Dr. Gourmet Diet Plan, I wanted to make it easier for people to have a good, quick breakfast without resorting to the drive-through window of their local fast food joint. So I spent a lot of time creating easy, healthy muffin and quick bread recipes so that you could do a little baking on the weekend and have them for breakfast all week.
One of the biggest challenges I faced after being diagnosed with Celiac disease was figuring out what to eat for breakfast. For years I'd eaten whole wheat toast with cheese or jam, but it took a long ttime before I found a gluten-free bread that was even close to acceptable. I'm only beginning to work on recipes for gluten-free muffins and quickbreads, so when I saw muffin tops from Udi's I thought I'd give them a try.
The Blueberry Oat version is pretty darn good. As with most gluten free baked goods, the texture is denser than it would be with a wheat flour muffin top. The folks at Udi's have done a fair job, however, at mimicking the flavor and mouthfeel of a blueberry muffin. All in all it is much more like a dense cake than a muffin. There are OK oatmeal and OK blueberry flavors, but it has a bit of a chemical aftertaste.
The best thing that could be said for this muffin is that the numbers are not too bad at 140 calories for a muffin top but the good news is that there are 5 grams of fiber. What this really tastes like is a Sara Lee or Otis Spunkmeyer frozen muffin that you would get at a convenience store. Strange to say it, but this gluten free muffin doesn't taste like a gluten free product. It is, like other processed baked goods, just not terribly good.
It is bad that that is the good news because the bad news is that the Udi's Chocolate Chia Muffin Tops are perfectly awful. They border on inedible. I took a second bite to make sure it was as bad as I thought - and it was. The texture was gummy and there was an overwhelming powdered cocoa flavor. There are little chocolate chips that have the texture of dried currants that are long past their prime. One taster said, "those are just gross."
Who cares about the 6 grams of fiber in this one? If this is what one has to do to get fiber at breakfast when eating gluten free (or even eating non-gluten free), then these muffins are simply not worth having.
Just remember our motto: "We eat it, so you don't have to." That certainly applies here.