Livoti's Old World Market

I love grocery shopping.  Some women buy shoes, some buy clothes, and dudes usually go for electronics.  I buy food.  Every grocery store is an adventure.

My most recent adventure was at Livoti's Old World Market in Aberdeen, NJ.  Last weekend, I wanted to explore, even though I knew I probably would only be able to take home spaghetti sauce and that's it.  After all, we're talking about an ITALIAN market, here.

Man, was I surprised when I found a large (compared to the size of the store) gluten-free section.

Now, my boyfriend's a bit picky.  He likes buying Rienzi's gluten-free pasta and won't try any of the other store brands of gluten-free noodles (unless I'm making pad Thai).  His reasoning is, they're an Italian company and Italians are known for pasta, so why buy from a company that doesn't know anything about pasta?

I guess that makes sense, but I actually like the quinoa one.  But I digress.

The store does carry the standard brands (Glutino, Schar, and Fruity Pebbles), but they had a wide-ish (again, compared to the size of the store) variety of imported food, most of which had very little English  and a whole lot of Italian on the package.

Most of the time, we get a choice of penne and spaghetti, and occasionally rotini are thrown into the mix.  Not only did they have those standards, but there were also fettucini, elbows, alphabets, big ol' square sheets for lasagna, and tubettini.  We bought the fettucini last week (haven't had time to try it, with all the Thanksgiving leftovers, though) and picked up the tubettini for soup.  Unless it's Passover, you're going to be hard-pressed to find as many pasta shapes in one store.

The best finds, though, were the Galbusera ZeroGrano crackers and wafers (which are labeled "Senza Glutine" right on the package).

One of the things that both of us have missed since cutting out wheat has been crackers.  The mainstream GF brands are okay, but you know as well as I know they're not Ritz.  These aren't Ritz either, but they're seriously good.  They're made with corn, potato, and rice, and, from what I've found with regards to GF matzohs, potato makes stuff tasty.  They are flavored with rosemary and sea salt and have a pretty decent overall texture.  They're not Ritz, but they're the best crackers for cheese I've had in gluten-free land.  Also, they're really good crumbled on top of soup.

The wafer cookies were much the same.  Mostly corn and rice flour (well, technically, mostly chocolate cream filling, according to the ingredient percentages, but you know what I mean).  I would put these up against any regular European wafer cookies and dare you to tell me which one has wheat and which one doesn't.  The filling is a little on the powdery side, but considering the wafers are spot-on, I really don't care about the filling.

For those of you not in the immediate Northern Monmouth County area, Piccolo's Gastronomia has both the wafers and the crackers, as well as cookies that I have not tried.

Those who frequent The City (NYC for those of you who don't know any better, I'm looking at you, South Jersey) might have come across Tate's Bakery's cookies.  Tate has a gluten free chocolate chip cookie, and Livoti's carries it.

Finally, on the list of things we haven't bought but might if we were in need of such a thing, Livoti's actually has store-made gluten-free heat-and-eat meals.  Both of us were all, like, "Holy crap!" when we saw the shelf.  They had, in neat little packages, gluten-free chicken francese, chicken marsala, chicken parm, spaghetti with vodka sauce, and rotini with pesto sauce.  All made without gluten ingredients.

And, being a grocer, Livoti's does have a nice selection of food that is naturally gluten-free, including meat (decent prices, too), fruits and vegetables (at the time of writing, artichokes are 2/$1.00), cheese, and tomato sauce.

So, if you're in the area and have time to kill, head down the soda aisle, and the last two sections on your left (if you're walking toward the back) will be full of gluten-free Italian goodness.