The Struggles of Finding Gluten Free (American) Chinese Food

When it comes to restaurant experiences, nothing seemed harder for us than finding gluten free Chinese food. Specifically, American take-out Chinese food. We usually would take these challenges as an opportunity to make these kinds of dishes ourselves, but with or without gluten issues (or other food allergies or sensitivities), Chinese take-out food seemed above our skill-set. If you’re in the same boat as Isabelle and you’ve also got a soy allergy and a corn allergy, then you’ve likely written off your chances of having American Chinese food ever again.

Finding gluten free Chinese food seemed like a pipe dream, and it was only after a long, long time that we even thought about the possibility of making it ourselves.

This took some smaller steps, of course. Between learning how to make our own fried chicken and experimenting with different gluten free flours, and doing research into what kinds of allergy-friendly substitutes existed, we realized that we could at least attempt to make our own gluten-free Chinese food.

Other Allergens to Consider

As we mentioned, soy and corn are other allergens that tend to be in a lot of American Chinese food. Other allergens that might come up are shellfish and peanuts.

There’s also usually crossover in the gluten free and soy free crowds when it comes to soy sauce (which typically contains both gluten and soy). This is why if you’re in the position of having multiple food sensitivities (or one unavoidable one) and you really want some classic orange chicken, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a restaurant that can meet your needs. It’s not the fault of restaurant owners by any means. But when most of the food has some kind of sauce or breading, making it allergy-free isn’t really possible.

How We Make Our Own Gluten Free Chinese Food

#1: Focus on key ingredients and flavors

When we began making our own gluten free Chinese food, we were mainly dealing with finding recipes that we thought we could adapt and making the changes necessary to make them allergy-friendly. With more research into different American Chinese dishes, we realized that there are common flavors that we needed to focus on: scallions, soy (which we’ll get to in a moment), ginger, garlic, chili, sesame, and sugar.

Once we’d really pinned down those flavors and figured out what we needed to add or change for each recipe, it became easier to try new things or make adaptations. The key is also that even if you’re subbing out ingredients to make allergy free or gluten free Chinese food, you’re combining flavors more than having one stand out on its own. When you’ve combined a soy substitute with sesame and ginger and garlic (for example), you can’t really pinpoint what’s “missing.”

#2: Find substitutes

What really made it possible for us to make our own gluten free Chinese food was finding the right substitutes. When we found that coconut aminos (like this or this) was a good gluten-free and soy-free substitute for soy sauce, it really changed the game for us.

The other component is finding a gluten free flour that works for you. We like rice flour for breading, and we often just do a light flour dredge. But we’ve found that many gluten free flours work for this. Additionally, we’ve managed to avoid Isabelle’s corn allergy by either adding a little gluten free flour to a sauce, or just by cooking the sauce down a little more. When you’re working with brown sugar in a recipe, this can work really well.

#3: Find good recipes, but also experiment

When you’re working with non-traditional ingredients, sometimes the best way to go about it is to take a good recipe (or a number of recipes) as a basis for where to go, and adjust accordingly. With our own recipe for orange chicken, we initially began by looking at recipes to figure out what we needed to include. But during the process of making it and combining ingredients, we made sure to adjust our ingredients as we went, stopping to taste along the way.

This is really key because once you get a sense for how the substitute ingredients behave, you can really create recipes that work for you. For example, when you’re subbing coconut aminos for soy because you have a soy or gluten allergy, you’ll likely need less sugar or a dash more salt to compensate for the coconut aminos’ slightly sweet flavor.