Is semolina gluten free?

The coarse middle of a durum wheat kernel. Durum is the hardest wheat grown, and milling it yields gritty pale granules rather than soft flour, which is what makes pasta hold its shape in boiling water. The same material is rolled into couscous, baked into semolina cake, and sold across South Asia as sooji, suji or rava.

Because it has four names and only one of them contains a hint. Somebody who has learned to look for wheat will catch semolina soon enough, but rava and sooji appear constantly in English-language Indian recipes and on imported packets with no explanation, and nothing about the words suggests a grain at all, let alone that grain. An upma or a rava dosa reads as a rice dish on a menu and is not one.

FDA — packaged food

Durum is in the genus Triticum, so FALCPA treats it as wheat and a label must declare it. A packet of sooji sold in the US says wheat somewhere on it, which makes this one of the cases where the back of the packet is far more useful than the front.

Elsewhere

The place the label cannot help is the restaurant, and South Asian menus are where this bites. Plain dosa and idli are rice and lentil and genuinely gluten-free; rava dosa and upma are semolina. The dishes sit side by side under the same heading and differ by one word that is not translated.

Learn the four words and most of the risk goes away: semolina, sooji, suji, rava. Two adjacent facts worth holding — Cream of Wheat is farina, a softer wheat, not semolina, but it is wheat all the same; and semolina is what bakers dust peels and loaf bottoms with, so it is a live cross-contact source in a kitchen that also bakes gluten-free.

• FALCPA — durum is Triticum and must be declared as wheat
• 21 CFR 101.91 — the 20 ppm standard for a gluten-free claim