starch, tapioca flour, sorghum flour, and fava flour ) without xanthan gum. It performs perfectly, it's available in bulk at my local Cash n Carry and would totally be a time saver...if it didn't taste like raw beans. Yuck!
Thankfully, I have the answer to making it edible. I was web surfing yesterday and saw a post on Cake and Commerce about making quinoa flour edible.
Naturally, I thought of bean flour. High protein, full of pesky saponins and tasting of raw uncooked legumes, it seemed a prime candidate for the cooking cure. The thing is, it's still pretty hot out, and I'm not interested in heating the kitchen.
So I nuked it. A half inch layer in a pie plate at 3:33 min (because it's faster than pushing 3:00) did the trick. It does clump slightly, so sift it or whirl it in a blender/food processor to deal with lumps. It worked great in crepes this morning, and thank God, there were no traces of uncooked bean.
You're welcome.
Note: I've since figured out that toasting the beans in the oven before grinding is easier and yields satisfactory results. Bake at 350 degrees until they look browned, check them, maybe stir half way through baking. Cool and grind.
Cake and Commerce says: ...because quinoa flour is so bitter, earthy, and grassy, it easily overpowers the other ingredients in a recipe. This is due, in part, to saponin, a toxic glycoside that coats the outer layer of the quinoa seed. Saponin can be washed off or removed via abrasion, and usually is before it is sold commercially to consumers. But the washing isn't always thorough enough, and some trace of saponin remains. There's also phytic acid, which gets in the way of the absorption of minerals in the digestive tract - this is removed to some extent by heat treating but requires fermentation and sprouting to more thoroughly break it down.
The saponin isn't a problem if you are buying quinoa seeds to use in savory recipes. All you need to do is wash the quinoa again, as you would certain kinds of starchy polished rice. But milled as flour and included in a recipe, this not-quite-washed-all-the-way grain becomes a gatecrasher and ruins just about everything it touches.
Yuck.
But there's an utterly simple solution to this, a solution that not only takes care of the bitterness and grassy flavors, but also inactivates trypsin inhibitor, (warning, long explanation ahead) a compound that reduces the bio-availability of trypsin, an enzyme which helps hydrolyse proteins (this is especially important for lysine, an amino acid that is vital to human health and is most commonly found in beans and dairy but occurs in quinoa in high levels).
The oven. That's the solution.
And quinoa is worth it. Its protein and fiber content is higher than wheat, it has fewer carbs than wheat, and it is packed with vitamin and minerals. Its fat content is slightly higher than that of oats and nearly 3x that of wheat. It works like pastry flour in baked goods, especially when combined with other flours. Trust me, baking the quinoa may be an extra step, but it is simple and easy and will make your baked goods better tasting and better for you.
You don't need to toast or pay attention to quinoa while you are heat processing it, but heat process it you must.
Here's all you need to do to make baking-ready quinoa flour:
- Preheat oven to 212 or 215 F (100 C)
- Empty out bag of quinoa flour onto as many sheet pans as you need, preferably onto a new piece of parchment paper
- Make sure the layer of flour is no deeper than 1/4"
- Place in preheated oven for two hours
- Remove from oven. Allow to cool. Place in bags
- Store bag in freezer for up to 8 months if you are not planning to use flour soon. Whole quinoa flour is relatively high in fat, making it vulnerable to oxidation and rancidity. Freezing will extend the shelf-life.
- Use as you would any other gluten-free flour
She notes that even triple washed quinoa needs the baking treatment to relieve it of the burnt plastic, grassy taste.
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