So I got a small bag of almond meal and I know nothing about it, except that it’s mainly used for baking (which I’m hopeless at). I’m broke and low on food so I can’t afford to not eat it, or get a recipe really wrong. Is there anything with almond meal I can cook in a fry pan or in a grill?
When I’m making bread in my bread machine, I’ll sometimes replace a portion of the flour with almond meal. Add some wheat gluten to keep it as cohesive. I imagine that that’d probably be true of other foods that use flour. I don’t do anything in a frying pan with it, but maybe pancakes?
Almond meal has a lower glycemic index than grain flours, so if you know someone who is diabetic, it can be useful.
EDIT: I assume that this is finely-ground, like flour. Someone else mentioned that it might be coarse. I’ve never used it for this, but I’ve sprinkled chopped almonds on yogurt, and I assume that one could do the same with coarsely-ground almonds.
It looks like a fine powder. Pancakes I can do, I might try that. Cheers.
I was thinking about trying that, so I’m glad to see it works! Do you have a particular ratio or just by feel for the amount of gluten?
I’m probably not a very good role model, but I tend to make bread on a “more-or-less-randomly-throw-things-in-and-see-what-comes-out” basis. The water, flour, yeast, and sugar get measured, and the rest of the stuff — egg, poppyseed, milk, oil, butter, nut meal, wheat gluten, whatever — gets more-or-less arbitrarily thrown in, and if it turns out different this time, hey, that’s all part of the novelty. I recall one time having family chuckling at my rye bread having a very low proportion of actual rye in it.
I don’t encourage people to follow my example, though, if they want consistent outcomes. :-)
But on gluten — if you add more, it’ll send the consistency further in the direction of high-gluten breads — chewy, like bagels or pizza dough. If you decrease it, it’ll make the thing more crumbly, more like cornbread. I’m sure that there are recipes out there that have settled on ratios that their authors were happy with, but I’ve never done that personally.
I’m pretty much the same way, sometimes I write it down just to get nutrition info (have diabetic family who like my baking), I tend to target a hydration and go from there so I’ll experiment with it, thanks. Totally get you on the fun part, been experimenting with adding a bunch of seeds and different flours for a while, keeos it interesting!
Lots of the commercially sold rye around here also doesn’t have a ton of rye in it, lots of commercial whole wheat bread is also pretty low percent wise too.