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Showing posts from November, 2017

Almond flour isn't just almond flour

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Looking around on the internet for how much almond flour to use instead of regular flour, I kept finding big variations, from 1:1 replacement to 1:2. Since baking is fairly finicky with the amount of ingredients, this confused me. But when I grabbed an extra bag of almond flour at the local grocery store (yes, there are specialty flours at the grocery store here), I noticed a difference in consistency and decided to take a closer look. Here's a close-up of the two flours using a macro lens. On the left is MeaVita Mandelmehl, on the right Borchers Premium Mandelmehl. In both cases, I've used a blunt instrument to gently distribute the flour to better see the difference. The flour on the left, the MeaVita brand flour, is in much larger chunks than on the right. The MeaVita flour also feels more moist, though I don't know if that's a direct effect of the size or because more oil has been extracted from the Borchers flour. It is, however, obvious that the two flour

An excellent high-protein deep-dish pizza dough

Based on Bobby Flay's Chicago deep-dish pizza dough; throwdown recipe , I replaced the 5 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour with 1 cup of seitan base , 1 cup of flax-seed flour, 1 cup of whole-wheat flour, 1 cup of all-purpose flour, and 1 cup that I'm not sure what was now, either more all-purpose flour or more flax-seed flour. Either would work, I'm sure. Notice that this is slightly less flour than the recipe calls for, that was on purpose, as the seitan base can make it rubbery if there's not enough water. The dough came out awesome. It rose like crazy and had a structure to die for. Combined with a spicy tomato sauce, pepperoni pizza, and cheese, this was a balanced pizza that blew us away. Balance: If the last cup was regular flour, it was 3:2 carb:protein. If it was flax-seed flour, it would be 1:1. Yes, you can have your protein pizza and eat it, too.

Bread of the day: Sunflower seed flour and extra water

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I've been baking more 1:1 breads recently, and I'm have nearly consistent success (unlike the English muffins and pancakes, which came out weird). There is some variations depending on the flour in question, so I am going to do short write-ups of what works and what doesn't. Some things have definitely worked, like this bread, which I think was done with flaxseed flour: Today's bread is also a regular loaf (what Danes would call "franskbrød"). Ingredients: 125 g. seitan base (a.k.a. vital wheat gluten) 100 g. sunflower seed flour (flower flour!) 375 g. flour (about 125 g. of which may or may not have been whole wheat, our boxes were mixed). 2 teaspoons salt 50 g. seed mix 21 g. fresh yeast 375 ml lukewarm water 2 eggs about 50 ml oil The procedure was the same as in  the original bread post . The dough was quite moist, not really coming together in the normal dough lump. It didn't rise nearly as much as the great successes, but somewhat: