Alice Medrich thought she’d perfected her recipe for chocolate soufflé – until she tried adding rice flour.
“Over the years, I’d eliminated the wheat flour that I usually use, because I wanted more chocolate flavour. When I started to experiment with rice flour, I found that the chocolate flavour was vibrant, but still with the creaminess that wheat flour gives you. It was the best of both worlds,” the James Beard Award-winning cookbook author tells Cityline.ca in a recent interview.
Medrich’s latest work is Flavor Flours, a stunningly-photographed, exhaustively-researched book devoted to non-wheat flours. In it, blueberry cobbler benefits from the addition of corn flour, coconut flour contributes to a delectable key lime tart, and buckwheat gingerbread is pleasantly earthy and spicy. Every recipe is gluten-free, but the Berkeley, Calif.-based pastry chef – who eats wheat – admits it wasn’t her intention for this book to be purely for those who can’t tolerate gluten.
“I love to work with new ingredients in new ways, it’s that ‘personal challenge’ thing,” Medrich describes. “These [flours] are available in a lot of supermarkets, and I just started looking at them and thinking, ‘What can I do with these?’ The idea was to treat them as ingredients used purposefully, not instead of wheat.”
Medrich, who worked with Portland, Oregon-based culinary instructor and long-time colleague Maya Klein on the book, says one of the biggest challenges was to unlearn a few fundamental lessons about baking.
“Almost all of Western baking is based on wheat flour, and wheat has gluten. Every technique for every recipe is either trying to work with or around gluten. You’re trying to discourage gluten development for cakes and cookies, and encourage it for bread,” Medrich notes. “That fact is what defines almost all of the techniques we use: how we mix, how we add ingredients together. Some of those techniques aren’t necessary [with non-wheat flours].”
In some cases, the recipes were much easier to assemble than their wheat-filled counterparts – imagine adding all ingredients together in one bowl and not having to worry about overmixing (which can lead to tough wheat-based cakes and cookies). In other cases, there were perplexing stumbles. Medrich and Klein had wildly different experiences with buckwheat-based cakes, and it took a while for them to realize that buckwheat works best in cakes that don’t require a lot of mixing – too much mixing, and buckwheat can turn gummy.
For every hurdle in non-wheat baking experimentation, there was a success story. Medrich recalls how amazed she was the first time she took a bite of oat flour sponge cake.
“Everybody knows the flavour of oatmeal, love it or hate it. But when you take that oatmeal and make a really fine flour of it, and make something light and fluffy instead of a bowl of mush – whether or not you like oatmeal, you might love that cake,” she enthuses. “The flavour is so good that you could eat it plain — it has these toffee and caramel notes that are so unexpected and delicious.”
Because these flours bring new nuances to baked goods, Medrich also includes flavour pairing suggestions at the start of each chapter. Readers will learn that teff flour pairs well with nuts, chocolate, and dark fruit; sorghum is well-suited to banana, figs, and berries; and chestnut flour works its magic on fresh cheese, honey, and coffee.
“We treat wheat as a non-flavour – something that holds up everything else,” Medrich says. “But as soon as the flour you’re using has pronounced flavours, why wouldn’t you want to know what other flavours go really well with it?”
Flavor Flours is now available in stores and online.
Photo of Alice Medrich courtesy Abigail Huller