Was this possibly it? 

I pulled it down and read the ingredients, it was like the bottles I looked at before except one ingredient was missing.  Wheat flour.  This might be it.  I couldn't just look it up, so I bought it, along with a few gluten free gains that I plan on testing out for my beer.

A moment of explanation for people who are not familiar with this asian food staple.  Oyster sauce is a product of Lee Kum Kee, a company known for sauces.  My family has used oyster sauce for ages and we always got a bottle that had a boat and a child on it.  This was known as the premium brand.  The other brand, which we thought wasn't quite as good, was their panda brand.  To my family, it lacked the depth of flavor that the main bottle had.  The sauce is like a demiglace, the product of oyster stew that cooked for too long and reduced itself to a salty, slightly sweet, slightly tangy glaze that had a full, savory flavor that worked well as a finishing sauce for noodles, vegetables and would lend a special flavor to ribs and chicken.  Oyster sauce fits one of the asian tastes known Umami. 

Once I got home, I looked up the sauce on their website.  I had checked several times this year but found the new entry, it was of this very same bottle.  I even looked up their section on gluten free sauces and it was in the list!  I was excited so I popped it open and poured it onto my plate and ate it with plain rice and chicken finally getting to taste a sauce I had missed for years.  It was everything I remembered.  It brought back years of having Sapporo Ichiban noodles with an egg dropped in, drizzled with sauce.  Gai lon, or common broccoli, lightly stir fried with ginger and garlic, finished with this very sauce.  Green beans with ginger and garlic and this sauce.  Oh, so many recipies I had to cut away from because I could not eat this. 

For a while, I've been using a storebought stock reduction that didn't contain wheat flour, it wasn't quite enough.  I was attempting to make my own, using a combination of chickenstock, vegetable stock, or mushroom stock reduced to a glaze.  I had just started with a reduced chickenstock that even now sits in my freezer, waiting for me to figure out what steps to do next, but it's no longer needed for it's original purpose. 

Gluten free fans of asian foods rejoice, there's another sauce that's made the list and we're a step closer to authentic asian food free of gluten.   This is surprisingly difficult when some people don't know about gluten allergies.  I've found a few who do, but even they couldn't guarantee anything.   I'm crossing my fingers for Hoisin sauce next and perhaps a good version of Pearl River Bridge mushroom soy sauce.  I know that San-J does a geat gluten free tamari soy sauce, and I use it quite often, but to me, it's thinner than the syrupy dark mushroom soy sauce that I love.  Gluten-free, we're getting there.

Hello everyone,   I'm Kevin.  I've been mostly gluten free for three years now, and I've decided to start up this blog in order to review products I taste, items I bake, and perhaps a large range of other gluten-free related things that I might do.  I also may try some thing that have absolutely nothing to do with gluten-free topics, but most likely, they won't be gluten related either.

As I said, I've been mostly gluten free for at least three years now.  Before that, for about twenty-some years, I was living a lifestyle without concern for allergies.  As a child, I had seasonal allergies that I took an allergy pill for, and I eventually, around the age of 8-12, found that I had some problems with dairy.  It was minor in that the symptoms lasted for only a day and were only gastrointestinal (if you don't know what it means, look it up, but make sure you're not about to eat a meal). 

I had trouble figuring out why my digestive system was acting up.  I thought that I wasn't getting enough fiber.  I then started baking.  Heavily.  I would bake using whole wheat, and white whole wheat.   Baking bread every other day, cakes every other week.  They would be loaded with high protein, high fiber wheats.  My digestive system got worse.  I soon looked up symptoms and cures and found bits and pieces of the disorder called celiacs.  I wasn't totally sure if I was just intolerant, or fully allergic, but I though that it was probably a bad idea to eat whole wheat each and every other day.  For several months, I went without gluten.  I lost some weight, felt less bloated and more energetic.  My digestive system got better.  Not 100% I think, but better. 

Despite this, I feared.  I was afraid that I would no longer be able to have bread, cake, beer.  All the fun dessert type items that I wanted to travel the world for.  For a year I would sit there, reading about gluten free products, the increasingly abundant. What was worthwhile, what was nutritious?  What was empty carbohydrates that were far worse than ordinary flour?

People think that the gluten-free lifestyle is healthier.  That is half true, and half false.  It's true if you look only at eating vegetables, legumes/beans, rice and animal protein (meat).  However, the baked goods that we eat, usually sparingly, consist of rice, processed potato, tapioca and maybe beans.  This means that the potential whole grain ability for baking is pretty hard to come by, and that our blood sugar is a little more volitile.  Eventually, people found that there were other high protein, gluten-free grains, like millet, quinoa and buckwheat.  These have been food staples for people, but they never got full recognition until the necessity for gluten free.  Some people, those who may not even be allergic, choose gluten free as a dietary path.  As for me, I'd love not to have to do it, but, until there is a cure, I'm happy with the substitutes, and I'm more than willing to share what they are, and my opinion of thm is, here, right on this website.   There are times when I may go off on  tangent, but I'll always come back to gluten free, and I hope to share all that I've experienced with you, dear reader.