Allergic to something in Chinese food...

[phage]

I am allergic to wheat. (I'm not a celiac - not allergic to gluten, just to wheat.) A little soy sauce usually doesn't bother me all that much - but some Chinese restaurants seem just to have a lot of stuff that gives me an unexpectedly intense bad reaction. So, here are my questions:

1. What makes some Chinese dishes so dark?

2. Do Chinese restaurants in North America sometimes thicken their food with wheat flour instead of corn starch?

3. What can I ask them to omit in cooking dishes?

I'm not talking about food that's clearly wheaty - like much dim sum, egg foo yung, chow mein noodles. It's the stuff that is mainly vegs. and meat, with various kinds of sauces.

--Phage

[liuzhou]

MSG is probably the most tested food additive and no scientific evidence of harmful effects has ever been discovered.

1. What makes some Chinese dishes so dark?

Soy Sauce, usually.

[Mr Wozencroft]

Some take-away chinese dishes in the u.k. have food colouring added. I'm thinking of the pink/red sweet and sour dishes. If you go the Chinese supermarkets you see plastic jars of the stuff. Its also nearly impossible to cook chinese food without using some m.s.g. (oyster sauce, chilli-bean paste etc) but thats ok cos me and m.s.g. are dear friends.

[hummingbirdkiss]

MSG is probably the most tested food additive and no scientific evidence of harmful effects has ever been discovered.

1. What makes some Chinese dishes so dark?

Soy Sauce, usually.

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ditto to this

when you say "intense" reaction what does that mean? stomach, throat, rash?

[Batard]

You have this problem only with Chinese food, and nothing else? If the problem is MSG, then you should also react to other glutamate-rich foods ...

[phage]

But, no, it's not an allergy or reaction to MSG. I have an allergy to wheat. And it's not just with Chinese food.

With a lot of food I can tell just by looking at it whether to avoid it. Or by feeling it, in the case of SE Asian noodles. They must think it very strange when I go into an Asian food shop and squeeze the packages of prepared soup - but those with wheat are hard and those made from rice are springy! This is more reliable than reading the labels - I've found some of these Thai or Vietnamese soups give the main noodle ingredient as "flour", but in French it says something like "farine de riz."

Back to the topic - I'm just wanting to know if:

A. Some ingredient(s) commonly used for flavor has large amounts of wheat, and what would it be?

B. Do they often use wheat flour for thickening (this considering that most Chinese restaurants are Cantonese, plus the odd Hunan, Sichuan, etc...)

C. And what can I (in a practical sense) ask them to omit or substitute.

Some restaurants are worse than others regarding their use of wheat. Unfortunately in my part of the country, they are the ones with the best Chinese food....

[Dignan]

But, no, it's not an allergy or reaction to MSG.  I have an allergy to wheat.  And it's not just with Chinese food. 

With a lot of food I can tell just by looking at it whether to avoid it.  Or by feeling it, in the case of SE Asian noodles.  They must think it very strange when I go into an Asian food shop and squeeze the packages of prepared soup - but those with wheat are hard and those made from rice are springy!  This is more reliable than reading the labels - I've found some of these Thai or Vietnamese soups give the main noodle ingredient as "flour", but in French it says something like "farine de riz." 

Back to the topic - I'm just wanting to know if:

A. Some ingredient(s) commonly used for flavor has large amounts of wheat, and what would it be?

B.  Do they often use wheat flour for thickening (this considering that most Chinese restaurants are Cantonese, plus the odd Hunan, Sichuan, etc...)

C.  And what can I (in a practical sense) ask them to omit or substitute.

Some restaurants are worse than others regarding their use of wheat. Unfortunately in my part of the country, they are the ones with the best Chinese food....

←

Perhaps they are dredging your meats to promote color?

[djyee100]

Soy sauce commonly contains wheat, although I don't know if this means only gluten. See the last paragraph before the Notes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_sauce

Also "Foods Commonly Containing Wheat" here: http://foodallergies.about.com/od/wheatall...heatallergy.htm

I did a search on Google for "wheat in soy sauce" and came up with a bunch of links.

[Fengyi]

Doing Chinese food for wheat allergies is very very difficult.

I used to cook chinese food for a friend who was a severe Celiac and that was almost impossible. I would make EVERY single sauce from scratch with wheat-free soya sauce. Pounding black bean, yellow bean, chili, etc.. all from scratch. Also, avoiding certain dishes altogether - for instance red-cooked dishes which rely on 'laochou' (dark soya sauce) as its impossible to buy this style of soya sauce without flour added. Those are the 'dark dishes' - swimming in hidden flour!

The trouble is: wheat flour is a ubiquitous ingredient in a lot of Chinese sauces - from Black bean sauce to various chilli sauces to oyster sauce to being the base for Tianmianjiang (used in a lot of Dongbei cooking).

There is an awful lot of wheat hidden in Chinese cooking that you wouldn't even suspect.

However, one good thing is that you CAN pick the starch used to thicken sauces. Here I use water chestnut starch, but potato starch is a favourite as it gives good bang for the buck in terms of thickening. Usually wheat flour is NOT used to thicken during stir-fries though. You can ask - most people in the US use cornstarch I think.

To be safe, do not order ANYTHING made with sauces. So you could have broth-based cooked green veg, white-cooked chicken (don't dip it in any sauce though), steamed things IF they have not used any sauces ( so black bean spareribs are OUT!), crystal-stir fried prawns. Also, even barbequed meats can be basted in sauces that contain wheat flour. you'll be better off picking Cantonese very simple dishes that are 'white-cooked' or poached.

I'm sorry, but you have to keep to absolutely the simplest things poached in stock and most soups. Even stuff like mapo doufu can harm because of the amount of flour in most commercial Doubanjiang.

I suspect that when you eat Chinese food you are ingesting a lot of hidden wheat flour and this builds up- despite no obvious wheat being present.

I'm sorry to be a gloom and doom person. But having cooked with a wheat-free kitchen for this friend, I know how difficult it is! At least you don't have to worry about hidden gluten too...

[Gastro888]

For their mise en place, Chinese restaurants often marinate red meats in a mix of soy sauce, flour, white pepper and sesame oil to be used during service. So this, along with the soy sauce may trigger your wheat allergies.

[Dr. Teeth]

There are a few doctors floating around the site. I'm not ofering you a medical opinion, but it would greatly help if you could let folks know:

1) What happens to you when you eat the food - "a bad reaction," isn't really helpful and usually means that it gives people the runs or bad gas, neither of which means you have a food allergy, and they don't want to talk about it.

2) What, if any, testing you have had done for your allergy.

Certain foods are hard to digest, and others have been more commonly linked to allergic reactions, so this isn't me just giving you a hard time.