Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Italian Bread Review

Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Italian Bread Review – Trader Joe’s has a wide variety of Glute Free products in their stores. The amount of Glute Free products has exploded in the past couple of years. One of the biggest areas in their stores is the bread section. Just five years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find a loaf of Gluten Free bread at Trader Joe’s and now I think there are at least 20 gluten free bread options (if you count bagels) and it takes up a lot of room. All the gluten free bread products sit next to the regular breads in most Trader Joe’s that I have visited (I have been to Trader Joe’s in at least 10 states now).

One of the hardest bread to get right with gluten free flour, is a regular white sandwich bread. The texture and flavors are not the same when you use rice flour as your base (There are other flours that can be used but rice flour seems to be the most common for many different recipes across different vendors). In the past, many gluten free breads I have tried have come off weird with gummy or sweet or hard textures. I don’t know who is baking this bread for Trader Joe’s but they have done a lot of research to nail down a decent loaf of white bread.

When I saw this on the shelf at my local Trader, I just thought it was regular bread mixed in with the Gluten Free breads, but as you can see it’s clearly got Gluten Free right on the bag! The reason I thought that is, it looks just like a normal loaf of bread. Albeit a little on the smaller side for a gluten load of sandwich bread, but much bigger than the Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Whole Grain bread which is really too small of a loaf to be useful for anything but the taste and texture were great. I would say the Gluten Free Italian Bread is almost double the size.

Final Thoughts

As with most Gluten Free breads these days, rice flour is the main ingredient with other grains playing a secondary role in flavor and texture. As you can see from the pictures, this loaf (as with many Gluten Free breads) has small bubbles and a uniform texture to the bubbles. This is a pretty simple product, so there is no prep or anything, except if you are making toast. The bread has a nice brown crust on it. It smells and feels like regular bread. Not too hard or gummy. Eating straight from the bag, I could barely tell it wasn’t wheat flour, except the slightly sweet aftertaste which I have noticed on a lot of gluten-free products. The bread toasted up nicely and with a little butter, it made a most excellent piece of toast. I really like this bread!

All in all, I could tell it wasn’t wheat bread. I could probably serve this to anyone in a sandwich or toast and they wouldn’t know it’s gluten free. Trader Joe’s has done a great job here and although I am not gluten free, I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t eat this.

I am going to give Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Italian bread 9 Bells!

Ingredients: water, starch and flour blend (modified tapioca starch, brown rice flour, rice starch, modified cellulose, guar gum), yeast, cornstarch, cane sugar, canola oil, whole grain sorghum flour, dried egg whites, psyllium husk powder, salt, invert sugar syrup, cultured brown rice (to preserve), brown rice, vegetable glycerin, deactivated yeast

CONTAINS: Eggs