A Muffin experiment with various flours

[Mike Nolan]

I've been looking at keto-friendly muffin recipes, and I'm not impressed.

So, I tried an experiment today. I made up the liquid base for muffins: butter, sugar (allulose), egg, buttermilk, leavening, vanilla and salt, then divided it into five parts and added 5 different type of flours to it:

Wheat, Almond, Coconut, Sunflower and Walnut

The left column is the wheat one, the top row is almond, the 2nd row is coconut, the 3rd row is sunflower and the 4th row is walnut.

Below is what I got, some baked and held together better than others for a variety of reasons.

What I've learned from the baking stage:

Almond flour has the reputation of baking most like wheat, and that was true here.

Coconut flour absorbs a LOT more water than other types of flours and needs something to bind it together better, such as egg.

Sunflower and walnut take longer to bake and don't hold together well, they probably need more egg as well.

But I was more interested in taste than texture. (Texture can be adjusted more easily.)

As for taste, so far I like the sunflower and almond ones the best (of the non-wheat ones). I'll let Diane sample them this evening and see what she thinks. The coconut one was the easiest to identify, as the coconut flavor comes through. The walnut one was good but a bit overpowering, walnut as a blend with other non-wheat flours seems promising, though.

I also took the remaining batter and mixed them all together and baked them. I haven't tried tasting that yet.

A small amount of wheat flour added to other flours also may have potential, and in small amounts it doesn't add many carbs. 2 ounces of AP flour spread over 24 muffins would be less than 2 carbs each. (If I get arrested by the food police overnight, tell them I did it for SCIENCE!)

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[Joan Simpson]

The almond definitely looked the best.

[Mike Nolan]

I sort of expected the other flours to not look as nice, because they have baking characteristics that are a lot different from wheat than almond is. But they're baked enough to taste, and that's what I was after today.

Diane thinks the almond ones would be good with blueberries, I may try that next, or maybe some with just almond flour and some with a little sunflower as well.

I think the buttermilk/allulose combination works well, though.

The wheat ones are actually a bit bland compared with the almond ones, but adding blueberries could alter that perception.

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