All power to alternative powder
From chickpeas to rolled oats and even rice bubbles, there are plenty of alternatives to scarce flour, writes Emily Brookes.
When travel writers Radha Engling and Brook Sabin returned from their latest overseas trip, they had to go into full isolation for 14 days. It could have been worse – they were in a small bach by the sea.
‘‘The only problem was that we had no kitchen staples,’’ Engling says.
‘‘We were even starting to ration carrots. My partner, Brook, doesn’t do life well on carrots.’’
Even if Engling had been able to get to the supermarket, there’s one thing she would have been unlikely to be able to purchase.
While stocks of most supermarket items have returned to some kind of normal after an early panic-run on things such as toilet paper and pasta, flour remains in short supply.
But fear not, a lack of flour doesn’t mean you can’t indulge in all that lovely autumnal baking that the lockdown seems built for, according to celebrity chef Nadia Lim.
There are plenty of items readily available at your local supermarket (maybe even already lurking in your pantry), which make excellent flour substitutes.
‘‘This whole no flour thing is opening up quite a lot of opportunities for people to try new things in baking,’’ Lim says.
One of her go-tos is a tin of chickpeas.
‘‘You just drain the can of chickpeas of the brine, and then you blend up the chickpeas and that acts as a starch instead of flour,’’ she said.
In fact, any can of beans will perform the same role, although Lim tends to prefer chickpeas or cannellini beans due to their neutral colour.
That isn’t to say that a darker-hued bean doesn’t have its uses – Lim has developed a recipe for black bean chocolate fudge brownies where the tinned black beans provide a rich colour.
Bonus tip from Lim: The liquid from a tin of chickpeas or beans, known as aquafaba, makes an ‘‘amazing’’ egg white substitute.
If you’re eating porridge on these cooler mornings, you’ll have some oats around. That means you can easily whizz up your own oat flour, Lim says.
‘‘Almonds are my favourite, even though they’re a little bit expensive.’’
‘‘Finely ground desiccated coconut works well, too. You can use half flour, half coconut to make your flour go further.’’
When Engling had a craving for pancakes in isolation, she wound up turning to breadcrumbs.
‘‘Expectations were very low but we were desperate,’’ she said.
In fact, Lim says, breadcrumbs are not unusual as a flour substitute. Recipes for old-fashioned steamed puddings, for example, often call for them.
And while the ratio of whizzed beans or chickpeas to flour isn’t an exact science – Lim advises following a recipe if you want to use those – and you’ll need to add about a quarter of a cup of ground almonds for every cup of flour, things like oats, coconut or breadcrumbs can be substituted measure for measure.
That’s how Engling approached her pancakes, using a cup of breadcrumbs where she would usually have added flour.
‘‘They ended up being seriously good,’’ she says. So good, in fact, that they inspired Engling to start a new Instagram account, @globalkitchencollective, for sharing innovative isolation recipes.
Those types of recipes are, unsurprisingly, starting to pop up all over social media.
Former Great British Bake Off contestant Briony May Williams, for example, recently shared a cookie recipe she developed that replaced flour with whizzed up rice bubbles.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s as true for food as anything else.
Crumble, for example, was developed in the United Kingdom during World War II when rationing put butter, flour, and sugar – the ingredients for a basic pastry – in short supply.
Who knows? Maybe breadcrumb pancakes are set to take their permanent place in New Zealand’s food culture.
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