Low Carb Bread

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been on a low-carb diet. It’s working pretty good, I’ve dropped 20 pounds over the first month. But I’ve been getting bored with the limited food choices and I went looking for low-carb bread recipes. What I found were a ton of gluten free recipes, and they weren’t yeast risen breads. I don’t have a problem with gluten, I just miss eating bread.

So I decided to experiment. I don’t do a lot of baking, and had no idea what I’d end up with, but I did see a lot of the no-gluten recipes using almond flour. It’s just finely ground blanched almond meat, apparently mostly fat and about 2% carbs. So I took a regular white bread recipe based on 2 1/2 cups of white flour and modified it as shown below. I added an egg because all the almond flour recipes used at least one, not sure it was necessary or helpful though. The dough was wet sticky, but I should have expected that since flour that’s mostly fat isn’t going to absorb much water. But it worked, the dough rose, and it all came out pretty good. A little dry and dense, but very tasty.

1 1/2 cups almond flour + a couple of tbsps
1/2 cup gluten
1/2 cup corn flour (masa)
3/4 cup warm water
1/2 cup warm heavy cream
1 pkg yeast
2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
2-3 tbsp olive oil

Stir the salt, sugar and yeast into the warm water and let sit for a while to get foamy. Mix the flours and gluten together well. Slowly add to the water while stirring, then stir in cream and egg. Add a little more almond flour to keep it from being too sticky, then coat your hands with some of the olive oil and knead the dough for a few minutes. It will be on the sticky side, but holds together. Use some more oil to coat the dough, then cover with a wet towel and let rise to double in size, about 1 hour. Punch down the dough, knead it a little bit, then put in an oiled loaf pan. Put the pan in a cold oven and set the temperature to 375F. Bread will be done in about 40 minutes.

Next time I think I’ll add more gluten and less almond flour. At some point I’ll try without the egg, maybe remove the cream and use slightly more water also. Reading around on recipes a little cornstarch may help, but that just adds more carbs.

Anyway, if you have other low carb bread recipes, or low carb recipes in general I’d love to hear about them.

2

:dubious: I think you will find that almond flour and corn flour are still mostly carbs (starch). I doubt that there is any way to make anything much resembling bread that isn’t mostly starch.

3

Almond flour is supposed to be 2% carbs, and the carbs in corn flour are supposed to be less digestable than those in refined wheat flour. I don’t see any reason carbs are necessary for bread at all.

4

You’ll find TONS of practical help with low-carb recipes (including bread analogs) here.

5

Not true at all. The nutrition information for wheat flour and almond flour are pretty easy to find.

6

Well, given that carbs is anything that is not protein or fat, and the structure of bread is formed of plant matter, which is primarily carbohydrate, you do rather need carbs for bread if you want anything remotely breadlike. [OK, rocks are neither protein nor fat, and are also not carbohydrate… carbohydrates need to be organic - made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen in various combinations with other elements.]

7

Don’t ever try low-carb pasta. That stuff is VILE! There was a reason why it was marked down from $4.59 to 25 cents! Nobody wanted it.

8

I’ve eaten a low carb/low fat/low sodium diet for 20 years and you will never succeed at low carb if you make and eat crappy low carb bread and dessert substitutes. Learn how to cook delicious fresh healthy food at home and after a year you’ll find most processed and restaurant food either tastes terrible or makes you feel sick after eating. You have to realize there is no reason to eat bread, pasta,and desserts every day but there is also no reason not to treat yourself every now and then to a helping of great sourdough bread or a slice of chocolate swirl cheesecake (oh my god!), or a plate of scampi, or some tacos, or maybe a handful of peanut m&ms…everybody needs to start eating like an adult, your diabetes bills are gonna bankrupt medicare before I ever get to sign up for it.

9

I got into an argument on a raw/alternate food ALT.REC back when it would come into my mail box as individual email posts [like perhaps 98 or 99]

Some woman was recreationally complaining that her son refused to use any nondairy ‘milk’ on his cereal, specifically soy and some list of homemade legume based ‘milks’ and she couldn’t get it through her head to just get a damned pint of cows or goats milk and to stop trying to make her kid do something he finds tasting revolting. It more or less was an issue that she was raised with it being pounded into her head that you gave kids milk as a beverage and on cereal, so by damned he had to have some white opaque liquid to drink and use in foods :dubious::smack: and since she felt moo juice from an animal was the evil, he simply had to be forced to do the vegan options.:rolleyes::smack: and she couldn’t get it through her head that he could get more than adequate nutrition drinking water and eating a balanced diet.

10

While I generally concur with the low carb diet (I use it too, to a large degree) there is no getting away from the fact that part of why it works is why most diets work while you are on them: The diet greatly restricts what you can eat, and at some point, you reach a point that you are bored with the available diet food and only eat when you are truly hungry.

If you find enough substitutes for the low carb diet, at some point, you are finding a way to eat more calories.

11

Thanks ThelmaLou. I see one of the recipes there is very much like what I made already. Somewhere, I don’t remember where, people were saying you couldn’t make anything like bread without a lot of carbs, yet on my first attempt and just guessing on the ingredients it worked quite well. I think with some tinkering I can get something much closer to regular bread.

12

That whole site is a great resource for low carbing. Glad you’re finding it helpful.

13

I made bread again today. I’ve adjusted the recipe as shown below. This came out better than before. The dough was firmer and had good elasticity. I made a baquette instead of putting it in a pan. It was somewhat lighter, and the texture was better. I think the big difference was increasing the gluten.

The problems:

It’s still kind of heavy. White bread of this density is okay, but this stuff has a lot of protein and it’s very filling. I’d like to get something much lighter and airier, like French bread. I’m considering letting the loaf rise for a while after it’s been formed.

The almond flour flavor masks anything esle. I left in the corn flour to counter this, but I’m not really detecting any flavor from that. Clearly carbs taste good, but I’ve got to find something else to cut down the amount of almond flour, and seasonings to give it some other flavors.

Otherwise, this is working pretty well. I’ll try taking out the corn flour next time and see what happens.
1 cup almond flour
1 cup gluten
1/2 cup corn flour
1 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 egg yolks
2 tbsp olive oil - in the dough
2 tbsp olive oil - for hands and coating

14

With a cup of gluten and 1/2 cup of corn flour/meal, your carb level is pretty high (by low-carb standards anyway). You should calculate a per-serving carb count to be sure. You might consider using a cup of bread flour instead of the gluten. You’ll get more elasticity, I think.

15

Gluten is a protein, so no carbs from that.

ETA: Just checked the package. Gluten lists carbs at 1%

16

Not exactly. That “1%” is misleading and not relevant. That’s not the right way to count carbs. Here’s what you need to know- look at the nutrition label here, and note how many grams of carb are in one ounce of gluten:

One ounce of gluten has almost four grams of carbs. That means that your one cup/8 oz. has almost 32 grams of carbs. Add in the corn flour, and your one baguette might have 40 grams of carb. A typical slice of ordinary bread has about 15 grams of carb per serving.

Anyway, if you’re going to do this, learn the right way to count carbs. Ignore that percent stuff. It has nothing to do with anything. Good luck. You’re on the right track.

17

You’re right. I was too hasty. Now I have to recalculate things. Just more reason to get this to produce a lighter dough.

Still way less carbs than wheat bread.

18

Google “Oopsie rolls” if you want a truly low-carb bread substitute.

19

These look great! And they will require the use of The Greatest Culinary Breakthrough of the 20th Century: non-stick foil.

20

Oopsie rolls do indeed look great! I don’t need the Splenda, they’ll taste good anyway. And I’ve been looking for something to use as hamburger rolls. Those should be perfect.