Davina Steel

Davina Steel

World award winning gluten free bread baking kits.

Our Story

Who's Davina?
Davina is a scientist and nutritionist. As a young child she hid bread under the bed, toothpaste in the freezer, a fresh egg in the back of the pantry and a collection of worms in an old jam jar, to name but a few. Why? To find out what would happen to them. In the case of the latter it was to see which end mud went in and other stuff came out (or, indeed, whether that mattered to the worm). She read everything she could get hold of and was often found curled under the stairs writing up her experiments. It was the perfect way to find space in a house containing six children, various friends, long-suffering parents, two dogs, a budgerigar and a couple of gerbils.

Per Aspera Ad Astra
Following cancer treatment, Davina became severely intolerant to gluten. Missing the beautiful, artisan breads she had always loved, she embarked on a quest to create a replacement for gluten that would allow her to make amazing breads just like the ones she’d always eaten. The only gluten free bread she could find was dry, sweet, crumbly and tasted of chemicals. Davina quickly came to realise the reason for this: it was just too difficult to make gluten free bread without adding fat, sugar and an array of additives to recreate the structure of 'normal' bread. Or was it? She tried every recipe, read any paper and book she could find and finally went back to basics to discover the structure and function of wheat and gluten in order that she could emulate it using only natural ingredients.

After a few months of intensive research and baking … creating things even the birds wouldn’t eat … she had finally discovered the Holy Grail of Gluten Free: beautiful bread that tasted so good you wanted to eat the whole loaf … and then ask for another. Winning The World read Awards twice and gaining 25 medals to boot, filled the team with a desire to share these artisan beauties with the world.

Our Vision
There is something magical about fresh bread. In fact, our culture is pretty bread obsessed: Whether we eat it at every meal or have to avoid it, bread shapes our lives. Those of us that must avoid gluten are more fixated on the absence of a good 'real' loaf than anyone. At Davina Steel we are determined to change this: it’s about time that those that can’t eat gluten have a seat at the family table to break bread together with everyone else.

Real Food
We only put natural ingredients in our products. As our man Dan says, “If you can’t pronounce it, then don’t eat it.” … No HPMC (hydroxypropyl methylcellulose to you and me), no preservatives or chemicals, just good honest delicious food made with real ingredients.

Simplicity
We’ve developed our kits and mixes to be easy: we’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to and now you can bake world award winning bread with our simple three step system … just add water oil and yeast, then MIX, RISE and BAKE.

Be Creative
Food should be fun and that's why we work so hard on developing new products. You’ll never find boring tasteless food at Davina Steel.

Our Values