(2002.01.21)
If you call up a friend and say, "I'm eating a pancake!", you are likely to get a response along the lines of "How nice for you." or "Thank you for sharing." I'm going to do it anyway: I'm eating a pancake, and I am a very happy camper. Mind you, there is nothing even remotely resembling wheat in this pancake, which is why I can eat it. There's no milk, either -- I used Pacific Almond "milk" in it. (If your pancake recipe doesn't call for milk, or calls for buttermilk, that's fine for you and probably tastes nice, especially if it's buttermlk, but I'm allergic. If your pancake recipe doesn't call for milk, well, okay.)
I don't use recipes for anything as simple as pancakes, actually. The flour substitute I'm using is a variable, for one thing, so any attempt at precise measurement for recipe purposes would have to be preceded by intensive calibration, and by the time I finished calibrating a particular batch I'd probably have run out of it. Seems counterproductive.
As to the flour substitute, it was given to me a few years ago, and was attributed to Kay Spicer. I modify it to handle what I have around, and also to use sticky-rice flour instead of plain rice flour. (Sticky-rice is sometimes called "glutinous rice", but I don't like that name because there's no gluten involved anywhere in the picture.) It's also called "sweet rice", probably not so much from its own sweetness (I've never noticed it to be any much sweeter than any other rice) as from the fact that it is used in lots of Asian desserts.
I thought I had the flour substitute somewhere on my Web site, but I'm not finding it, so here is what I recall:
5 c Rice flour 1 c Maize (Corn) flour (fine grind, not cornmeal) 1 c Potato flour 1 c Tapioca starch 1 c "Whole bean" flour (see note, below) 3 Tbs Xanthan Gum
Mix these things as thoroughly as you can. The original recipe seems to call for 2 minutes in a food processor; I just shake them a lot in a sealed container. The resulting flour can be substituted straight across for wheat flour in ordinary applications. (I haven't tried to make regular yeast-risen bread with it, and I have my doubts.)
Note: We figured that by "Whole bean" flour she probably meant chickpea; but I'm currently using a peculiar mung bean powder with other things in it (cowpeas, for example), and that seems to work reasonably well. I think I've tried chickpea twice. Once it was fine, but the other time it gave the mix a strong and rather objectionable taste. So go figure. As an alternative, btw, you can try chestnut flour. That produces a strong taste as well, but it's a very nice rich one.
There are other alternatives as well. One that I have been looking for over the last decade or so but have never seen is breadfruit flour. If you know where I can get any, please advise! (I've put my email address at the bottom of the page.)
(Other Note: I didn't find my copy of the recipe because I didn't do a Web search. When I went to look for Kay Spicer, a moment ago, the first hit was my page with this flour substitute on it. Argh.)
There are apparently people who don't like Xanthan gum, for some reason. I personally have nothing against it, nor do I mind carrageenan or any of the typical vegetable gums -- guar, locust bean, etc. Xanthan gum is somewhat different, in that it is produced by bacteria. Carrageenan is also different, in that it is extracted from seaweed; but it's all the same to me. Whatever works, works. I've never seen any convincing claims of toxicity for any of them.
The one real drawback to this flour mix, as far as I can tell, is the fact that gums differ from gluten in their response to cooking. You can take wheat flour and make a donut that dunks beautifully in a cup of coffee, but I'd advise you not to try that with this stuff. Get it wet, and it just falls apart. It's okay for pasta, though, because of the egg. Just don't cook it too long. (Hey, don't cook any pasta too long!)
Despite the fall-apart-when-wet issue, this type of mix,
if you choose your flavors well, makes a rather happy
pancake.
(More as I think of it.)
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 21 19:31:08 PST 2002