Beans of any other name

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English: Pitha made from rice flour with cocnu...

English: Pitha made from rice flour with cocnut,jaggery,black pepper filling (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my quest to make gluten-free flour for my friend, after the unsuccessful attempt at grinding the rice, I decided to see what else I could get hold of locally that would allow me to produce flour at less than the supermarket price.

I returned to my initial site: http://glutenfreegirl.com/2012/07/how-to-make-a-gluten-free-all-purpose-flour-mix/ and worked my way through the list looking at what my blender could survive and was cheap enough to be in my limited budget. Anything nut based was automatically disregarded as my fiancé is allergic to nuts.  I didn’t want to try rice flour again so began to research the other possibilities.

WHOLE GRAIN FLOURS

 

buckwheat flour

Corn flour
mesquite flour
millet flour
quinoa flour
sorghum flour
sweet potato flour

teff flour

WHITE FLOURS/STARCHES

arrowroot flour
cornstarch
potato flour
potato starch
sweet rice flour
tapioca flour
white rice flour

However, one section that interested me was the bean flours. I had never heard of flour made from beans before. On the other hand I had never heard of any of the beans on the list either: fava bean flour, garbanzo bean flour and kinako (roasted soy bean) flour.

I worked my way through the list to see how much they were on amazon as an example. Then realised I had no idea what these beans looked like and if I had to use these specific ones or if I could use others. I Googled the fava and garbanzo beans and found that fava beans are a type of broad bean and that garbanzo was another name for chickpeas.

Apparently chickpea flour classes as a whole grain, so following the rule from earlier of 40% wholegrain to 60% white flour or starches; I needed to find another flour to create my all-purpose celiac substitute.

I really wished I could use the white rice flour as that was the easiest to get the ingredients for however after my last attempt I needed something else. This left me with the option of garbanzo flour.

To make the garbanzo (chickpea) flour:

You take dried chickpeas blend them in a food processor and then sieve out any remaining lumps.

However it has been suggested that it is possible to use canned chickpeas instead if the recipe you intend to use the flour for will be adding liquid anyway. We used canned chickpeas to make pizza (Post to follow soon) and added less water than suggested by the recipe as the chickpeas were already soft.

White and green chickpeas

White and green chickpeas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I hope this post was helpful. There will be more up shortly on how we used the flour, hopefully, with pictures.

Relevent:

How to make your own bean flour can be found at http://www.livestrong.com/article/472318-how-to-grind-bean-flour/ along with ideas of the best things to use it for at http://www.livestrong.com/article/516649-how-to-cook-with-bean-flours/

Over at the little house on the prairie Julie also suggests the ways different bean flours can be used why not check it out at: http://www.littlehouseliving.com/making-and-using-bean-flour.html

Whilst Googling for garbanzo beans I discovered the recipe for a gluten free snack which I will test out and let you know the results asap:  http://www.steamykitchen.com/10725-crispy-roasted-chickpeas-garbanzo-beans.html

http://www.celiac.com/articles/863/1/Gluten-Free-Flour-Alternatives-by-Karen-Robertson/Page1.html – an article about different uses of gluten free flour. No recipes but helpful nonetheless.

http://www.cooksinfo.com/broad-bean-flour – a cooking dictionary where I learnt about bean flour this week.

http://the100poundchallenge.wordpress.com/ – a recipe for pizza using chickpeas as the base

http://www.whats4eats.com/blogs/chefbrad/how-to-make-chickpea-flour – one way to make chickpea flour

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