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| raisin-spice almond flour cookie |
This past week I finally made the commitment to myself to stick with a limited diet in order to get some relief from my digestive symptoms and pinpoint the offending food(s). I slipped up one day last week and had a slice of bread, 2 graham crackers and some soup made with instant potatoes. One or all of those foods caused so much pain I could hardly function for a day. That was the motivation I needed.
So I went to Trader Joe's and bought some almond flour. (I wanted to go easy on the rice for a few weeks, as rice sometimes bothers my gut, too.) I'm new to baking with almond flour, by the way. My past gluten-free baking has relied on rice flour.
I brought the almond flour home and proceeded to make the cookies on the back of the package.
The recipe calls for 1 egg plus 1 egg white. I didn't want to have to deal with the leftover egg yolk, so I made a 2/3 batch of the cookies, using only the whole egg and skipping the white. Much math later and I had a lovely batch of 16 good-sized chocolate chip cookies that were completely grain-free and allergen-free (for me that is, others could have an allergy to tree nuts or eggs), containing almond flour, butter, brown and white sugar, egg, salt, baking soda, vanilla extract and chocolate chips.
Those cookies were so incredibly good. The texture is that of a soft cookie and not overly sweet (my batch used a total of 5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon of white and brown sugar combined). I still had several left when my son and daughter-in-law came over on Father's Day. Knowing that my daughter-in-law is also gluten-free, I offered them some cookies at dessert time. Both of them loved the cookies.
Also on Father's Day, I had planned on baking some sort of bread product to go with our lunch. I found several good recipes for almond flour biscuits that looked like something both my daughter-in-law and I could eat, made with almond flour, butter, eggs, baking powder, salt, and honey.
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| photo credit: foolproofliving.com, the site where I found this biscuit recipe https://foolproofliving.com/almond-flour-biscuits/ |
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| trying to get the portion of butter just right for the recipe -- it looks like I'm stacking building blocks from the 1-lb butter block. |
By Tuesday morning, we had polished off the chocolate chip cookies and the biscuits, so it was time to bake another batch of something. This time I decided to tweak the Trader Joe's cookie recipe to make raisin-spice cookies.
I made the raisin-spice cookies slightly smaller than the chocolate chip ones, so this batch made 20 cookies. In addition to subbing raisins for chocolate chips, I added pinches of ground cinnamon, ginger, and cloves to the dough. These are very addictive. But again, as with the chocolate chip cookies, they're not overly sweet and I feel like they may have some health benefits with the almonds and raisins.
If you're not familiar with almond flour, here's a little information. There are two kinds of almond flour, blanched and unblanched. The blanched almond flour is made with almonds after blanching and removing the skins, while the unblanched almond flour is made with the almond skins still on the nut meats. The blanched flour is preferred by many bakers due to its uniform color and texture. However, the unblanched almond flour is often less expensive and adds a nice home-baked appearance to the cookies or muffins. For your information, I used only blanched flour in both the chocolate chip cookies and the biscuits, but I used half and half blanched and unblanched flour in the raisin-spice cookies.
In addition to the almond flour that I bought at Trader Joe's, I also bought some unblanched almond flour from the bulk bins at WinCo on Monday. WinCo carries both blanched and unblanched almond flour. The blanched flour was about $4.50/lb, while the unblanched flour was about $3.89/lb. I wanted to try the unblanched in cookies and see what I thought of it. As I said above, I used a mix of both types of almond flour in my second batch of cookies and thought the cookies were good and didn't suffer from using part unblanched. Price comparison between Trader Joe's and WinCo's bulk bins, Trader Joe's 16-oz package of blanched almond flour was $6.49. So there's about $2 or more savings by buying the almond flour from bulk bins. The one caveat, if someone has celiac, I'd be hesitant to buy a gluten-free flour from a bulk bin where in-store cross contamination is a possibility. WinCo does dispense its almond flour (and other gluten-free flours) from containers that require pulling down on a handle and the flour flows out, as opposed to dipping a scoop into a bin. Their method of dispensing these flours likely minimizes in-store cross contamination.
Another thing to know about baking with almond flour (whether the flour is the blanched or unblanched variety), almond flour relies on eggs as both a binder and leavening. Regular wheat flour, in contrast, is a binder in itself and holds doughs together. A quick look at many almond flour baking recipes may surprise a person by the number of eggs called for. In addition, almond flour tends to result in denser products than those based on wheat flours. But we didn't find that an objectionable quality in either cookies or biscuits. I imagine almond flour layer cakes might not be as light and airy as traditional cakes, unless several eggs were used for leaven.
So, that's been my experience with baking with almond flour this past week. I prefer both the texture and flavor of the baked products using the almond flour over my previous baking with rice flour. But I see a place for rice flour for some folks who need to be gluten-free. Rice flour is more economical than nut flours, and rice flour is less likely to pose allergies compared to tree nut flours.
Anyway, for myself, I'm just hoping to heal my insides so I can get back to normal living. If almond flour can help me, then I'll be happy to use it.
Have you baked with gluten-free flours before? What was your experience? Was there any that you'd never use again? Any that were particularly good?
