Switching to coconut flour

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I've been doing some investigating and I'm switching to coconut flour. It's amazing what they put in our "raw" food these days just to make a quick buck or make someone addicted to buy more because they "crave" more
 
How much is coconut flour vs normal? We're using rice flour a lot more due to MrsC's gluten intolerance which has become quite bad recently, but it doesn't have quite the same effect as flour. You also need to then add xantham(sp?) gum as a binding agent.
 
eureka mills have a natural stone-ground flour which i've been using for a couple of years and it's great.
 
blunomore said:
What will you use the flour for?
Click to expand...

Anything you want really (read my reply to cerebus)

maumau said:
eureka mills have a natural stone-ground flour which i've been using for a couple of years and it's great.
Click to expand...

how natural IS it really? and how much is the cost vs normal flour? I found these people LIE through their teeth just to sell you a product

cerebus said:
How much is coconut flour vs normal? We're using rice flour a lot more due to MrsC's gluten intolerance which has become quite bad recently, but it doesn't have quite the same effect as flour. You also need to then add xantham(sp?) gum as a binding agent.
Click to expand...

It's R60/500gr at a place I found in Emmerentia. And you use about a 1/3 of whatever wheat recipe you're using to substitute for of the flour, so I think it's good bang for your buck. You're right though, it's really "thirsty" so if you don't add more liquid and a good binding agent, it will crumble on you. Eggs are a good binding agent but it can get expensive using a lot of eggs (think it takes about 8 eggs for 1 cup of this flour), however you can use flaxseeds as a binding agent (1 part flaxseed to 3 parts hot water, get them to saturate/expand and add to the flour)
 
AcidRaZor said:
Anything you want really (read my reply to cerebus)



how natural IS it really? and how much is the cost vs normal flour? I found these people LIE through their teeth just to sell you a product



It's R60/500gr at a place I found in Emmerentia. And you use about a 1/3 of whatever wheat recipe you're using to substitute for of the flour, so I think it's good bang for your buck. You're right though, it's really "thirsty" so if you don't add more liquid and a good binding agent, it will crumble on you. Eggs are a good binding agent but it can get expensive using a lot of eggs (think it takes about 8 eggs for 1 cup of this flour), however you can use flaxseeds as a binding agent (1 part flaxseed to 3 parts hot water, get them to saturate/expand and add to the flour)
Click to expand...

Thanks man I'll pass this onto MrsC she's always looking out for good alternatives to flour because she's a heckuva baker.
 
What's your issue with flour?

Is it the bleaching process? Because it is perfectly safe btw...
 
AcidRaZor said:
It's R60/500gr at a place I found in Emmerentia. And you use about a 1/3 of whatever wheat recipe you're using to substitute for of the flour, so I think it's good bang for your buck. You're right though, it's really "thirsty" so if you don't add more liquid and a good binding agent, it will crumble on you. Eggs are a good binding agent but it can get expensive using a lot of eggs (think it takes about 8 eggs for 1 cup of this flour), however you can use flaxseeds as a binding agent (1 part flaxseed to 3 parts hot water, get them to saturate/expand and add to the flour)
Click to expand...

I am just surprised because I did not take you for a baker. Just the other day you did not even have pots and pans, so I thought you were not into the whole cooking/baking scene.
 
DJ... said:
What's your issue with flour?

Is it the bleaching process? Because it is perfectly safe btw...
Click to expand...

"safe" If you stone-ground your own wheat into flour then awesomeness. But they process and concentrate the **** so much it's unbelievable. Plus people with gluten allergies (some people just get moerse fat if they eat wheat) can use this as an alternative.

blunomore said:
I am just surprised because I did not take you for a baker. Just the other day you did not even have pots and pans, so I thought you were not into the whole cooking/baking scene.
Click to expand...

I bake before I cook :) And I have a full set of pots and pans now AND those ceramic white bowls you can use in the oven. Doing a kisch later today to experiment. Wanted to buy stuff at the shops but fnb's systems went down. bye bye swipey swipey
 
AcidRaZor said:
"safe" If you stone-ground your own wheat into flour then awesomeness. But they process and concentrate the **** so much it's unbelievable. Plus people with gluten allergies (some people just get moerse fat if they eat wheat) can use this as an alternative.



I bake before I cook :) And I have a full set of pots and pans now AND those ceramic white bowls you can use in the oven. Doing a kisch later today to experiment. Wanted to buy stuff at the shops but fnb's systems went down. bye bye swipey swipey
Click to expand...

A what?
 
AcidRaZor said:
I've been doing some investigating and I'm switching to coconut flour. It's amazing what they put in our "raw" food these days just to make a quick buck or make someone addicted to buy more because they "crave" more
Click to expand...

More info!
 
Does he not mean quiche?

Anybody use almond flour? Wonder if this would be cheaper than coconut.
 
Oh and the problem that you will inevitably have with gluten-free flours is that the gluten in flour is kinda essential to most recipes. It is, for a lack of a better phrasing, the building block of mesh networking that interacts with other ingredients to form what we know of as dough, or a sauce, or a cake etc.

Flour is not simply a fine particle that acts in isolation - the gluten formation of flour is kinda essential to most dishes...
 
DJ... said:
Oh and the problem that you will inevitably have with gluten-free flours is that the gluten in flour is kinda essential to most recipes. It is, for a lack of a better phrasing, the building block of mesh networking that interacts with other ingredients to form what we know of as dough, or a sauce, or a cake etc.

Flour is not simply a fine particle that acts in isolation - the gluten formation of flour is kinda essential to most dishes...
Click to expand...

You so clever, what are you, a gourmet chef?

I wonder how many mom experts in baking will know that.
 
Let's take a white sauce for example. The fats attach to the flour and coat them, making them easy to disperse in hot liquids. As the starch strains cook, long or short chains of these are formed because of the gluten and the starch. The shorter a chain, the less of a thickening effect it will have, but it will help to prevent the sauce from congealing. The longer the chains (as a result of quicker cooking times of the roux) will thicken more efficiently but congeal easily too. While this is the result of polysaccharides in starch (and not necessarily the gluten), the gluten creates the network for the starches to be distributed.

All of this is due to the way that starch and gluten networks interact at varying temperatures and in the presence of different fats and liquids. The keys being the gluten and the starch. This process helps a cake to stay risen. While flour is not a leavening agent, it is a stabilising agent once something has risen. Remove the gluten and you have no structural integrity to fall back on. Ergo your cake flops. Your coconut flour is gluten-free and starch-free, so its density will mean very little in the way you are describing it, Acid. You claim that you will use less because of this, when in fact if you want to substitute it for flour in cakes, sauces, and in fact any recipe that doesn't simply call for hardening (like a biscuit), you're going to have to use far more coconut flour to get a result that resembles flour. You're then stuck with a massive issue in your ratio of dry and wet ingredients, so the recipe simply won't work.

Coconut flour is pretty useless stuff in terms of replacing flour in recipes. You can bake a cookie with the stuff but anything else and you're left with a dense brick, as is the problem with any starch-free flour or gluten-free flour. You can increase the leavening agent content and use egg-based emulsions to act as a protein stabiliser, but this is quite an art and will not replicate gluten networks or polysaccharide starch chains. It is also wholly useless in sauces...
 
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