Low-Glycaemic Flour Mixtures

With these two flour mixtures, you can replace standard type 405 wheat flour 1:1, so you can adapt your own recipes without reworking them. Both recipes yield 1 kilogram.

Flour Mixture

• 600 g wheat flour type 405
• 200 g almond flour
• 200 g resistant dextrin

Gluten-free Flour Mixture

• 600 g almond flour
• 250 g resistant dextrin
• 150 g coconut flour
• 1 tsp konjac flour

Why these flours behave differently

Gluten-free flours that contain little starch are mainly made from oleaginous seeds such as cassava, linseed, hemp seed, chia seed, hazelnut, walnut and coconut. They are milled from the press cake, the solid residue left when the oil is pressed.

Because these flours still contain ten to twelve percent oil, digestion is slower, and so is the release of sugar. Dr Coy postulates that this slower release, together with the high fibre content, is what makes these flours behave so differently from cereal flours in baking.

The fibre also binds a great deal of water, which increases the volume of the mixture. Alongside the higher protein content, this is why doughs made with these flours handle differently from wheat doughs and often need less flour by weight than a cereal-based recipe would.

Resistant dextrin, which appears in both mixtures, is a soluble fibre. Konjac flour is used in small amounts as a binder.

Both mixtures are high in fibre.

Baking with these flours

Many of these flours develop a nutty, pleasant aroma when heated, which makes them well suited to baking, and to enriching and thickening sauces.

Almond flour works particularly well as a partial substitute for cereal flours, because of its subtle flavour and light colour. Coconut flour is also worth using, and combines easily with almond flour in baking.

Both of these flours lack gluten protein, as all flours made from oilseeds do, so you need a gluten substitute when baking with them. That means either combining them with conventional flour, or adding resistant dextrin and konjac flour, as in the two mixtures above, to hold everything together.