Paleo Wraps (coconut-based) are pretty good

[Kaido]

Website: (lots of videos)

http://paleowrap.com/

$10 for a 7-pack on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Julian-Bakery-.../dp/B00EPTYHGA

Yes, they are expensive - nearly $1.50 each. This ain't no Dollar Menu! They are made from coconut meat & coconut water (70 calories, 4.5g fat, no cholesterol, 6g carbs/4 impact carbs). They are shelf-stable, no need to refrigerate. I have a grains allergy, so no wheat or rice wraps for me! I've made 4 wraps so far and they have all turned out good.

They have the same sickly-sweet smell that unrefined coconut oil does. They are very mildly sweet, but once you add the filling, they are neutral-tasting. Very thin. The texture is kind of between paper and fruit rollup, hard to explain - basically invisible when you're eating it, which is a good thing.

The amazing thing is how well they hold up - I have no broken one yet, despite loading them up with heavy stuff like sauces & meats! So they don't just fall apart like most of the other gluten-free wraps I've tried. I usually do a homemade quinoa wrap (takes like 15 minutes to cook though) or use a simple veggie wrap (kale, collard green leaf, lettuce wrap, etc.), so this is a nice (but expensive) change of pace. I can basically toss whatever I want - eggs/bacon/potatoes, tuna salad, chicken/dressing/greens - on it and eat it, more or less an insta-meal, with no worries of it falling apart.

Anyway, just throwing it out there. It's a nice, albeit pricey, wrap option.

 

[blackdogdeek]

Have you looked into buying some coconut flour and making your own? I found a few recipes online but I haven't priced coconut flour yet to determine if it's more cost-effective that way.

 

[Kaido]

Have you looked into buying some coconut flour and making your own? I found a few recipes online but I haven't priced coconut flour yet to determine if it's more cost-effective that way.

I haven't found a recipe that matches the ones from Paleo Wraps quite yet, have you? I like these because they can sit on the shelf (no refrigeration required = lasts a long time) & are very strong compared to most of the wraps I've tried.

I'll have to do another post on alternative wraps at some point. I used to eat wheat, corn, and rice wraps, but now that I'm allergic to grains, I've switched over to green wraps (kale, collared greens, lettuce, etc.) and things like homemade quinoa flour wraps.

 

[blackdogdeek]

I haven't made any of the coconut wraps myself but did find two candidates for a first attempt but one of them had arrowroot flour in combination with the coconut flour.

Basically, I'm hoping you get a good recipe down and then tell me what it is

 

[Kaido]

I haven't made any of the coconut wraps myself but did find two candidates for a first attempt but one of them had arrowroot flour in combination with the coconut flour.

Basically, I'm hoping you get a good recipe down and then tell me what it is

Haha! I'll see what I can do I did just dig my dehydrator out of storage, so I'll add it to the list of things to try this year. I did a bit of digging into the coconut-wrap story; I had read some negative reviews against Julian's Bakery on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Julian-Bakery-...dp/B00EPTYHGA/

A lady named Deborah Krueger went to town on them:

http://low-carb-scams.com/

From what I can piece together, Julian's Bakery was mis-advertising low-carb bread (in 21 varieties), which had a negative impact on people who were diabetic (incorrect carb counts in food is obviously a huge danger to people who are severely diabetic). Deborah had some testing done and found it that the products were not as advertised. There's some reading here:

http://low-carb-scams.com/the-bernie-madoff-of-the-low-carb-scam-artists/

https://www.dietdoctor.com/the-julian-bakery-low-carb-trainwreck

http://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb-bread-another-fairy-tale-bites-the-dust

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/...s-requests-they-immediately-cease-sales/14568

I have tried their coconut-flour bread before and it was pretty horrible (and tiny, and expensive), but I really like their wraps. However, their wraps seem to be a rip-off of another product called The Pure Wrap: (which is also available in curry flavor, sounds good!)

http://www.improveat.com/

http://www.thepurewraps.com/

https://www.facebook.com/coconutwraps

I read through the article comments from Deborah & Julian's Bakery and I can't quite make sense of the whole story. It seems like the Pure Wrap guy may have had a patent pending and the Julian Bakery guy went ahead & made his own to capitalize on the design. I dunno, it's pretty confusing, and also highly unusual for a company to resort to arguing on blog comments (both Todd from Pure Wrap & Heath from Julian commented on the blog article), so that's weird. There's some other sides to the story as well. It's also very difficult to remove someone who is doing bad business from the system thanks to advertising, legalities, and so on.

Company drama aside, I like the product - my only complaint is that it's ridiculously expensive for what it is. I can easily eat two wraps at lunch, which is nearly $3 without any ingredients (assuming I eat a pair every day for lunch, that's $90 a month plus meat, veggies, dressing, etc. for the filling), so if I can figure out a good way to make my own, I'll definitely go down that route. It's only two ingredients, so how hard can it be? Haha. The curry Pure Wraps are still backordered (due in March); apparently they opted to go with a different supplier because their old manufacturer was not complying with their production standards. On the plus side, I did discover some good DIY links in the comments, I just gotta find some coconuts! lol

 

[Kaido]

Ahah, found a recipe:

http://beingberta.com/post/37906598458/robertas-raw-coconut-wrap

You need a few coconuts (for the fresh meat & water). Just blend together & then dehydrate for 10 hours. I have a basic round Nesco dehydrator & a mechanical A/C timer, as well as a Blendtec blender, so it shouldn't be too hard to try. I'd be curious about the economics of it, especially how much each wrap ends up costing (if the price difference is negligible, then I'll just buy the Paleo Wraps in bulk). I haven't seen any coconuts recently at my grocery store, but I think my local Asian grocery store has the partially-husked version of the young Thai coconuts like this:

http://www.rawglow.com/youngcoconuts.htm

For curiosity's sake, I'd like to try making them myself, so I'll see if I can run over to the store sometimes this week. I busted out my dehydrator because I recently had dried tomatillos (small green tomatoes) that were amazingly tasty & wanted to try making them myself, so I'll give those a shot too haha.

 

[blackdogdeek]

This is the recipe I found that mixed arrowroot flour and coconut flour:

http://stupideasypaleo.com/2013/08/23/simple-paleo-tortillas/

Doesn't sound too expensive since you use such a small amount of flour to make 3 wraps.

 

[Zargon]

how/when did your wheat allergy come about??

 

[Kaido]

how/when did your wheat allergy come about??

I believe I've had it all of my life, but I wasn't diagnosed until a couple years ago. Unfortunately, the currently available testing methods are not 100% (IgE, endoscopy, etc.) unless you're a full-blown Celiac, which I am not. So you basically just do the elimination diet - be ultra-strict for a few weeks & see if you feel better. It was like a night & day difference for me.

I was basically tired all the time. I had "brain fog" (like when you're groggy in the morning, but all day). I had anxiety (always felt "bad", like I was going to be fired or a deer was going to jump in front of my car or whatever, even though there wouldn't be anything provoking it...it was just an allergic reaction). I was always cold. Dry skin, hangnails, light eczema on my upper arms. Random low-level stuff like that. It would come & go...I noticed it most when I was really busy at work and would skip breakfast & lunch, I'd have a TON more energy at the end of the day, then eat dinner & crash.

And it seemed like everything bothered me...deli meat, chips, bread, even mustard. Turns out all of those things have gluten in them...you have to buy special brands (like Boar's Head gluten-free sliced deli meat) to be safe. I also have a dairy allergy, and my gluten allergy is actually a "grains family" allergy as I found out last year - no wheat, millet, corn, sugarcane, rice, and so on. Fortunately there's a lot of alternatives available - seeds like quinoa & buckwheat (buckwheat's not in the grains family, it's a seed!), coconut flour, almond flour, etc. Plus gluten is a really "popular" allergy right now, so a lot of products are coming out, and the whole Paleo movement is generally grains & dairy-free, so I can eat most paleo diet stuff, which is awesome.

The biggest pain is having to cook all the time. I appreciate food and I like to try new things, so I have to be super careful at restaurants. I'm always trying to find things I can substitute or create more variety of. Like with the wraps, I make a lot of quinoa wraps, which taste good but stink (it's smelly stuff). I do a lot of green wraps - lettuce, collared greens, kale, etc., which are just like burritos if you learn how to wrap them right. Here's one to get you started:

http://honestfare.com/mastering-the-collard-wrap/

Some wrap ideas:

http://imgur.com/gallery/C3e70

I haven't found any good grain-free bread yet, so I'm making due with wraps (burritos, tortillas, tacos, etc.) until I can find or make a good recipe. The Paleo Wraps in the OP are nice because they don't fall apart and they don't taste like a leaf. I've gotten used to green wraps (they're actually amazingly tasty with the right filling), but sometimes I just want a neutral shell that isn't going to add any flavor, like when I do a breakfast burrito or a tuna salad. My quinoa wraps take nearly 15 minutes to make a single one (and makes the house smell bad because quinoa flour stinks lol), so it's nice to have a no-prep option like the coconut wraps. Except that they get pricey haha.

 

[Kaido]

This is the recipe I found that mixed arrowroot flour and coconut flour:

http://stupideasypaleo.com/2013/08/23/simple-paleo-tortillas/

Doesn't sound too expensive since you use such a small amount of flour to make 3 wraps.

I do have arrowroot flour, so maybe I'll give these a try tonight, thanks for the link! I have a bunch of egg-based wrap recipes I've been meaning to try; the only thing I'm worried about is durability (the coconut wraps hold up amazingly well, unlike most other wraps that fall apart pretty easily). I also just got my hands on some buckwheat flour on Saturday, so I'm anxious to start cooking with that. There's a few buckwheat-based wraps I want to try, such as this one with tapioca flour:

http://www.justasdelish.com/buckwheat-wrap-gluten-free-wrap/

Ideally I'd like to build up a reserve of recipes & then freeze them in batches so I can have some variety during the week - a kale wrap on Monday, a coconut-flour wrap on Tuesday, a mustard green wrap on Wednesday, a buckwhat wrap on Thursday, and so on. This has really opened up a whole new range of lunch options for me because I never really used lettuce/leaf-type stuff other than in salads & on sandwiches, so it's neat learning about all of the available wrap materials!

 

[Kaido]

I tried out the "Pure Wraps" brand today:

http://improveat.com/whatoffer.php

1. They are smaller than the Paleo Wraps (but still square)
2. They are chewier
3. Cost was $3.99 + shipping for a 4-pack ($5 shipping = $8.99 shipped)

Despite the history/business fued between Pure Wraps & Paleo Wraps, I like the Paleo Wraps better. The Pure Wraps, with shipping costs, worked out to nearly $2.25 per wrap, which is over 75 cents more expensive per wrap. Since they're smaller, I definitely need 2 for lunch at minimum, which works out to $4.50 plus the ingredients for the filling. I didn't really like the chew factor, either - they were "drier" than the Paleo Wraps (which are a bit closer to a stiff fruit rollup) and had the mouthfeel of a plant-based wrap (like kale or collared greens - you had to bite through & chew it up as part of the ingredients, rather than as a container for the ingredients).

With plant-based wraps, the chewiness is okay because you're supposed to eat it as a plant, but it was a little off-putting in my tuna salad wrap (my tuna salad is basically mush; the Pure Wrap was way more solid when chewing a bite, which I didn't really like). I'll try it with some more substantial ingredients (like chicken), but I'm kind of glad it was only a 4-pack. I will order their curry flavor in the future to see what that tastes like. I still need to find some young Thai coconuts locally to try dehydrating my own. I kind of suspect the coconut cost & time/effort cost will work out to more than it costs for pre-made wraps.

And even though they are expensive, I do like coconut wraps because they offer a different eating experience than my other wraps. I can't do wheat, rice, or corn-based wraps due to food allergies, so right now I do either plant-based wraps (lettuce, kale, collared greens, mustard greens, etc.) or a quinoa-flour wrap. The plant-based wraps work well, but the plant flavor & chewiness does become part of the meal, and you have to have fresh greens on hand all the time to make them. The quinoa flour ones are really good, but they take a good 15 minutes to cook a single one and stinks up the kitchen, plus it's more of a "bready" wrap, so the coconut wraps are kind of a nice, neutral middleman for throwing any flavors inside and not requiring refrigeration or prep-time. Grab & go!

Edit: Not such good luck with heavy ingredients & the Pure Wrap. I scrambled 3 eggs & put salsa on top...the bottom broke open as I was eating it. Bummer. Definitely not as strong as the other brand. I'm still interested in trying their curry flavor though, which should be available early this month.

 

[Kaido]

Got the curry-flavored Pure Wraps in. Not bad. Not much curry flavor (in fact really none at all), although they do seem a bit sweeter than the other kinds, but not in a gross way. There is a massive curry smell though. I happen to really like curry and I was hoping for more of an Indian-flavor "bite" to them, but it was mostly just aromatics. This definitely isn't one you'd want to bring to work, my wife could smell the curry across the room haha. I also have a pack of Sunfood-brand coconut wraps coming in:

http://www.sunfood.com/coconut-wraps-7-pk-3-5oz-raw.html

I did manage to find a couple coconuts (the "young Thai" ones that are wrapped) at an Asian grocery store, so I'll be giving those a shot tonight. The only catch is that I apparently don't have a "standard" dehydrator - mine is round and has a connector piece in the middle, so you can't really make big square sheets because there's a hole in the center of it:

http://www.amazon.com/Nesco-FD-61WHC...dp/B0002WSQHU/

Excalibur makes a standard square box unit, but I currently don't have a $200+ need for one:

http://www.amazon.com/Excalibur-3926...dp/B008OV4FD0/

I don't remember the price, but I think they were about $2.50 per coconut, so I'll have to do the math & see how many sheets I get. I'm guessing it's not going to be cost-effective, despite the high price of the pre-made wraps. And so far I like the Paleo Wrap version the most - not only is it the cheapest coconut wrap option, but it's also larger (easier to wrap & eat) & doesn't fall apart under "load".

To recap, I can't do grains (no corn/wheat), so I have to look elsewhere for wrap materials. As mentioned previously, greens work well (kale, mustard greens, collared greens, various types of lettuce, etc.) and quinoa has worked out great. If you ever want to try a quinoa wrap, it's very simple:

1. Whisk together 1:1 quinoa flour & water (1/3 to 1/2 cup of each works well)
2. Cook on a Teflon pan at a notch under medium heat
3. Roughly 6 minutes per side

The downside is, it stinks up your house (quinoa kind of smells like feet until it's fully cooked, no joke) and it takes a really long time to make a single wrap. I've experimented with adding other flours, adding eggs, etc. but the quinoa/water combo has worked out the best. It takes a bit of practice to do, because if you add too much quinoa or too much water or cook it on too high of heat, it will crack the wrap. But, it makes a great high-protein wrap for stuff like tuna salad, so that's great.

 

[Kaido]

The Sunfood wraps arrived today:

http://www.sunfood.com/coconut-wraps-7-pk-3-5oz-raw.html

* $9.99 for a 7-pack
* $5.50 shipping = $15.49 shipped
* About $2.22 per wrap
* Roughly 1/2" larger than the Pure Wraps

These are interesting. Much more like thick parchment paper - stiff but bendable. It will snap off if you fold it sharply, but if you are pulling it around a curve (burrito-style) it actually stays in place, kind of like origami. Surprisingly, I didn't hate eating it (I thought it would be like thick paper) - it was almost like eating a soft, thin cracker. Held up well with a can of tuna & homemade mayo.

 

[Kaido]

Here's one DIY coconut wrap recipe:

http://thecoconutmama.com/2011/03/coconut-wraps-recipe/

I've been using my dehydrator a lot more lately, but because I have a round one with a hole in the middle (stackable Nesco unit), I can't do large sheets of anything (fruit rollups, coconut wraps, etc.), so I may have to get one with square trays at some point.

 

[Kaido]

Have you looked into buying some coconut flour and making your own? I found a few recipes online but I haven't priced coconut flour yet to determine if it's more cost-effective that way.

Finally found a good DIY wrap I really like: (the one you linked to earlier)

http://stupideasypaleo.com/2013/08/23/simple-paleo-tortillas/

Ingredients:

* 2 eggs
* 1 teaspoon Melted Coconut Oil (microwave it since it's usually solid)
* 1 tablespoon Water
* 1/4 cup Arrowroot Powder (aka Arrowroot Flour or Arrowroot Starch)
* 1 teaspoon Coconut Flour
* Pinch of salt

It's a bit eggy, but it's flexible, easy to make (just throw in a blender & pan-fry on a nonstick pan over medium), and holds ingredients well. Makes great breakfast burritos! Also useful in other applications (popovers, waffles, etc.). Good tutorial on how to fold a burrito here:

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-wra...eat-it-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-189756

If you use a larger 12" saucepan to make the tortilla & then a smaller amount of ingredients, you'll get better results when folding. If you put too many ingredients in, it just falls apart & you'll have to eat it like a taco. These also freeze well, both as individual wraps & as filled burritos, so I've been doing make-ahead breakfast burritos, which are awesome! This is by far the best dairy-free, gluten-free (well, grain-free for me) wrap I have eaten, period. I've been buying the small Bob's Red Mill bags of arrowroot locally, but I found a big 5-pound pack for $22 shipped on Amazon that I'll try next:

http://www.amazon.com/Anthonys-Arrow...dp/B00I9LUUP2/

Would definitely recommend these...very easy to make with good results. Be aware that the battery is extremely liquidy, it's not like a thicker pancake battery or anything like that - but it does puff out quite a bit if you do anything other than a thin crepe, so keep that in mind if you're pouring it in a waffle iron that latches closed (don't use too much because it can pop the latch!).

 

[Saint Nick]

Thanks for the info. My girl does ketogenic dieting so this stuff is relevent to her interests.

 

[JBT]

Picked up some of the Paleo wraps, I haven't tried them just yet. Looking forward to them with my eggs tomorrow morning!

 

[Kaido]

Picked up some of the Paleo wraps, I haven't tried them just yet. Looking forward to them with my eggs tomorrow morning!

As an FYI, they hold wet ingredients pretty well - I throw salsa in with my eggs sometimes & they do a good job holding up. Well, I eat them right away since it's kind of a foldable burrito wrap (so I dunno about like, long-term seepage for an hour or more), but they don't fall apart while I'm eating, which was a huge improvement over all of the other commercial kinds I have tried! I just do a quick fold-over like in these videos: (scroll down for the Youtube clips)

http://paleowrap.com/

 

[Kaido]

Thanks for the info. My girl does ketogenic dieting so this stuff is relevent to her interests.

Np - here are some rolls to try as well:

http://paleospirit.com/2013/paleo-dinner-rolls/

These are a bit trickier...whereas the arrowroot flour wraps above are easy (throw in a blender, pour in a pan), you have to play with the level of coconut flour in each batch until it gets stiff, but not too stiff. End result is great tho - almost has a buttery flavor, flaky outside, crunchy exterior, soft interior. If you have a Silpat (I have the knockoff ones), it makes working with baked goods super easy. I'm trying out that recipe for pizza this weekend as well, I think it will be the best yet based on how the rolls turned out!

 

[JBT]

I just found about 100 packs of these things at my local Spouts on clearance for $4.99 a pack!

 

[Kaido]

I just found about 100 packs of these things at my local Spouts on clearance for $4.99 a pack!

Wow, that's an insane deal!