While the Paleo lifestyle does eliminate wheat flour from your diet, it does not eliminate flour altogether!
You can still enjoy cookies, muffins and cakes (in moderation) by using alternative, grain-free flours, and they are delicious!
Here are my 4 favourite grain-free flours:
Blanched Almond Flour (ref.) is made from very finely ground blanched almonds. You can replace regular flour with it in your recipes using similar quantities. The only difference is that almond flour doesn’t have the same elasticity as regular flour because it doesn’t contain gluten. So to compensate, I add 1 or 2 extra eggs to bind my mixtures together. If I am baking muffins or crumbly types of cake, the almond flour works perfectly! No alterations to recipes are needed.
Coconut Flour (ref.)is made from grinding coconut pulp after it has been squeezed for coconut milk. Made up mostly of fiber from the coconut, this flour absorbs a lot of liquid. My suggestion is to use one quarter of the amount of regular flour you would use in your recipes but results may vary. Getting the right texture is sometimes a challenge with coconut flour. A little bit too much and the texture will be grainy and dense. Add too little and the mixture won’t hold together well. So play around a bit with quantities until you hit the sweet spot!
Arrowroot Powder and Tapioca Starch are great wheat flour alternatives because they have an airy, light texture. They are perfect for thickening sauces without compromising on taste (wiki).
Doesn’t it seem so much easier to adopt the Paleo diet knowing that there are healthier alternatives for the mainstream ingredients we use in everyday recipes?
If this kind of lifestyle change speaks to you and your desire to lose weight naturally, then I have some great news for you… 😉
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To health and happiness, Carin Andersson