Ground almonds courtesy of Waitrose
Originally uploaded by Manne.
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For the past week I have had a menacing cold bubbling in my throat and nose, just waiting for the most opportune moment to break out in a total snot storm of bed locked horribleness. Of course it decided to do so on Friday evening...
Weekend has thus been spent drinking Lemsip and experimenting with various ginger infusions and toddies to see which works best. Toddies, unexpectedly (how could Lemsip ever compete with whiskey...).
Because of my sad state, today I really felt deserving of some proper comfort food, so when W got back from the gym we fried up some really nice sausages (smoked bacon and leek, yum) and made puff apple pancake. Yes, I have blogged about the glorious puff apple pancake before, so I won't bore you with it again.
What we did this time though was a serious attempt at bringing down the sugar and carb content. The normal recipe calls for quite a lot of brown sugar, but also 90 to 100 grams of white flour.
Cutting the sugar is difficult if you want to retain the guilty satisfaction of eating the dish, so we kept that. However, as we proved today the flour can be replaced with ground almonds or almond flour, cutting out a helluva lot of carbohydrates and producing a result that in my opinion actually tastes better!
While I think of almonds as a nut, they are actually a seed. If you can provide a simple explanation on when a nut is not a nut but a seed, feel free to leave it in the comments as I really don't get it.
Regardless, almonds have a lot of the same properties as a nut: low in carbohydrates (less than 10%), a good amount of protein (20%) and a really high fat content (over 50%). They also contain a healthy dose of fibre and vitamin E. Grind it to a powder and you have a nice Low Carb High Fat replacement for flour!
I even read that almonds may help to raise HDL cholesterol while lowering the LDL. While that is a pretty simplified view of cholesterol I don't think it can be a bad thing.
My baking skills are less than good, so I wouldn't be able to tell if this can replace flour across the board. Probably not, I don't think almond powder has the ability to form the strands of gluten that trap the CO2 from the yeast to allow bread dough to swell. If you have tried to use almond powder in baking, let me know how it went!
Puff apple pancake, half devoured (sorry about that, couldn't stop ourselves...)
Originally uploaded by Manne.
Our puff apple pancake rose nicely in the oven, came out nice and browned with a slightly savoury taste that went great with the apples and sausages. Success! Will definitely try to use ground almonds in more dishes to see how it performs.
