Review - Feel Free Donuts

Ahh...donuts (doughnuts?? Donuts??). It's kind of the holy grail of snack foods for the average coeliac. Mainly because it's one of those foods that is virtually impossible to find gluten free.

Unfortunately, the way gluten free flours tend to work means that doughnuts tend either to fail to prove properly, or they turn into small, round brickettes soon as they've cooled Seriously. For a short time a few years ago, Tesco produced a gluten free jam doughnut. They were ROCK solid. If you heated them in the oven for 10 minutes longer than recommended, at a slightly higher temperature than recommended, they were perfectly edible for a good half an hour. Score!

So the excitement at this year's Allergy Show in London was palpable when Feel Free previewed their new sugared ring doughnuts. Oooh, they were so good! Fluffy, sweet, doughnut-y. You get the picture.

Ever since, the coeliac world has waited with baited breath for the day they'd be able to buy these lovely hoops. And at last, that day is here! Feel Free sent some doughnuts to our local support group for tasting (I'm on the committee) and a couple were passed on to me. Yay!

Please excuse the battered condition of the box - it's actually down to transportation between people, rather than the way it arrived from Feel Free. Anyway...they arrive frozen, which is a bit novel. There are four doughnuts, each in individual wrappers, so you can keep them in the freezer and pull one out to defrost whenever you fancy it.

As you can see, they come with a generous coating of sugar, which is a very nice change, as almost every gluten free doughnut I've encountered so far seems keen to shed it's sugar en route!

After defrosting, you remove the plastic wrapper and nuke the doughnut for 20-30 seconds in the microwave, until it's all puffed up and warm. Lovely!

The doughnut itself was delicious. It was sugary and warm and light and fluffy - just as a good doughnut should be. But, for the sake of honesty, I have to say that it was very, very oily (not the case when I tried them at the Allergy Show). I tore a bit of doughnut off by hand and the oil was literally running down my fingers. I squeezed it gently in tissue and soaked through two tissues.

Would I buy these doughnuts myself? It was a really tasty doughnut. Easily the best I've come across in terms of the texture. But the amount of oil in them did put me off a bit. So yes, I probably would buy them, but as a treat on occasions, and I'd give them a damned good tissue squeeze before I eat them!