Mother in law has type 2 diabetes. She’s also a huge white rice eater but tolerates bread. I’ve been playing around with baking with oats. anyone have any tips or tried and true recipes for oatmeal bread baking?
From the baking recipe sites, it seems like the standard recipe uses no more than 1/3 oat flour. Is there a reason for this?
Steel cut oats in a blender = oat flour? Oat groats in a blender = oat flour? Or is oat flour something different?
the breads I’ve done with the home blendered oat “flour” don’t seem to rise very well. Is this my “flour” or the fact that oat flour just doesn’t rise?
I’ve got a good recipe for diabetic oatmeal cookies that uses splenda.
I don’t have a good oatmeal bread recipe. Something that’s got a lot of oat component be it flour or whole, preferrably whole wheat flour. How about a pita bread?
anything special for oat bread baking times, temperature, no-knead version, other tips and tricks?
As always, thanks in advance.
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Oat flour won’t rise. It needs gluten to trap the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast. Without gluten the gas escapes. You can buy specialty gluten flour made from wheat flour from which the starch has been removed. Here’s a link to a description of one, but they’re available in markets as well. Try adding in a small amount of the gluten stuff to your oat bread.
edited to add: I probably should have looked at your location field first. It may not be available in markets. I remember having to travel 160 kilometers to buy cheese, and it was individually wrapped slices of american cheese at that. Although in Shanghai you probably have a good chance.
Oat flour doesn’t have anywhere near the gluten- the stretchy protein- that wheat flour does, so it doesn’t rise well. That’s why recipes will recommend a mix with not a lot of oats. I have no idea what magic they use to make gluten-free bread rise, but I think you’re either going to have to do a flour mix or something like oatcakes, which are flatter.
No way you could make no-knead bread with it. That’s all about the gluten. Sorry.
An oatmeal/whole wheat mix will give a dense, tasty wholemeal bread. It won’t rise much.
I make a large amount of pin head oats (steel cut ) in a crock pot early in the week with a water/ cooking time ratio that yields a gelatinous product.
There’s usually some left over when I bake bread, in which the oats make up about 1/4 of the grains/starches. The liquid amount varies by how much the cooked oats contain.
In short, no recipe, but;
Using the extracted gluten as Bill Door suggests (if wheat flour is verboten ) could yield a raiseable dough, though likely dense.
I add 1/8th cup of oatmeal to most any bread recipie. Just an addition, no adjustment to anything else. I use the regular oatmeal (do they have Quaker Oats in China?); not the instant goo.
She might be willing to eat muffins, which can be made to raise with baking powder. I make some low carbohydrate muffins with ground flax seeds, wheat bran, unsweetened coconut, and protein powder. They’re more appealing than they sound, high in omega threes and fiber. Really high in fiber, if you’re not ready for it you might want to start slowly. They move the mail better than the Pony Express.
Let me know if you want the recipe.
I usually make a big batch of the powder and keep it in stored in the freezer. It has equal portions of:
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Ground flax seed (I grind my own in a coffee grinder, but you can get it milled for you)
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Wheat bran
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Protein powder
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Unsweetened dried coconut
To make the muffins I take three cups of the above mixture to which I add:
5. 3 eggs
6. 1 tablespoon baking powder
7. 3 tablespoons olive oil
8. 1/2 teaspoon salt substitute (It’s not to avoid the salt so much, as for the potassium. I’m light in potasssium in my diet. You can use regular salt, no problem.)
9. Enough water to make it batter, usually around a cup and a half to 2 cups.
Bake at 350 deg F for 35 minutes or so. It makes 6 huge muffins. Each one has 12 grams of fiber and a ton of omega three and omega 6 fatty acids.
While in my opinion they are healthy food, they are not by any stretch of the imagination low calorie. They have 360 calories of which 66% come from fats, depending on what kind of protein powder you use. I usually use the lowest carbohydrate protein. They’re good fats though.
You can add splenda if you want to make a sweet muffin. I’ll add some and a half cup of frozen blueberries, or chopped walnuts, or whatever. If you want different flavors you can use unsweetened DaVinci or Torani syrup in place of some of the water, or add some cocoa powder and extra sweetener.
Thanks to all for explaining to me why my last batch of cookies (where I substituted oat for white all purpose) just didn’t work out. Not that cookies have to rise per se, but the texture was hinky.
The transit time challenged thank you, Mr.Door.
Thanks for the feedback. In China, oatmeal is widely available, although usually instant. In shanghai, I can get imported rolled oats from Australia or England. I can also find oat groats that are grown in China.
Adding about 1/3 oat flour to the overall flour mix seems to be the workable solution.