Baking With Oat Flour

My wife and I like to cook at home, and I recently wrote about our recently discovered advantages of old fashioned oatmeal vs instant oatmeal.  We’ve also just discovered the benefits of baking with oat flour.

I recently discovered that one of my aunts was diagnosed with celiac disease.  This set me on trying to find out the nature of this disease, and what it may mean for her.  That’s when I learned about oat flour.  Turns out, a surprisingly large number of people can’t consume gluten, yet it is nearly omnipresent in our society.  In reading about the recommended diet for celiac disease sufferers, I learned about ways to avoid gluten.  One of the most common ways to do this is to bake with oat flour.  You can go out and buy oat flour in small packages in the store, and from what I’ve seen, some brands can be ordered online.  A popular gluten-free brand is Cream Hill Estates Whole Grain Oat Flour.

Making Oat Flour

The more highly processed, commonly used forms of oatmeal are the instant oats with which we’re all familiar.  This is the stuff that comes in the tall red cardboard canisters.  This is made by separating the bran from the endosperm, and then repeatedly steaming and rolling the endosperm to soften it for cooking, which is the reason it can be cooked in 5 minutes.  Interestingly enough, the endosperm is also the part that is used to make oat flour.  We have taken healthy instant oatmeal, put it in a blender (or food processor),  and made oat flour at home.  You can use it to replace all-purpose white flour with oat flour one for one in many of your recipes.  This is an interesting way add extra fiber to your diet in baked good without the grittiness most people associate with whole grain food.  For people who need to follow gluten free diets, beware of your source of oatmeal.  Many companies process oats jointly with wheat products.  Before you take this approach, check into your source.

Baking With Oat Flour

As for taste, we usually use this approach when making pancakes of waffles.  As most of you probably know, getting kids to eat anything that contains fiber can be quite the challenge.  But if it’s a pancake, that’s a whole different matter.  So, you can make pancakes by replacing your all-purpose flour in a 1:1 ratio, but we usually replace about half of the white flour with our own oat flour.  It tends to make the pancakes a bit more “crisp” but other than that, there’s little different in taste or texture.  This approach also works well in baked goods, such as cookies and breads.  To be honest though, we haven’t tried baking with oat flour in a cake, or for that matter, pizza dough.  Pizza dough in particular usually requires a high gluten content to get that “stretchy” texture, so it may not work well there.  It may be a project to try though…

For more tips on baking with oat flour, check out the following book of gluten-free baking recipes.