The challenge was – to cook some grain free bread without an oven.
The experiment was – make up one of my usual batters and see if it would cook in the frying pan.
The question was – would it be like a flat bread or a pancake, a crepe or a pikelet, a wrap or a fritter?
This is for anybody else who doesn’t have an oven, but who would like to try out breads that are not just gluten free, but also grain free and starch free.
So I started with my Grain free, dairy free Pumpkin & Cashew Bread recipe using pumpkin that had been baked in the oven.
The first experiment was to have another try at using the blender (see my Carrot Cashew Blender Bread) instead of the food processor. I can report that it didn’t work this time. I think because baked pumpkin is quite dry, and it needs a wetter mix to work in the blender. Boiled pumpkin would have worked, or half pumpkin and half yoghurt. Or even half something like coconut cream would have made it interesting and kept it dairy free.
But all was not lost. Into the food processor it went and it mixed up fine. Most of the mixture went into a loaf tin and into the oven and cooked up just like normal. But I reserved a few spoonfuls to try frying pan cooked flat breads.
Tip 1
Make sure the pan is very well oiled. You could also use a non stick frypan, but the coatings are not good for health, so I avoid them. A very well seasoned cast iron frying pan would be good, but still oil it well. I used a stainless steel one covered with coconut oil.
Tip 2
Have the pan at quite a low heat. It will take a while to cook through, and you don’t want the outside too dark. I set the temp to about 1/3 of the way round.
Tip 3
When you spoon in the mixture, don’t make it too big and smooth it out to as thin as you can get it. Not too big, so you can flip it. And as thin as possible so it cooks all the way through.
“How is this different to a pancake?” you may ask.
The process is just the same, except that you will probably need to cook it a bit longer on each side, maybe 3 to 5 minutes.
Like a regular pancake, you could top it with butter and syrup, but the aim is more for it to be a bread substitute and be topped with a sandwich filling.
How it’s different to a flour based pancake:
• There’s no gluten to help hold it together, so be careful flipping
• This mix was thicker, so the texture was more like a vegetable fritter. If you make a wetter mix, you could make a thinner flat bread.
• It was more nutrient dense, and so more satisfying – so you can’t eat a stack!
