Bread: It’s not cheap to buy, and these days you’re lucky to find the prepackaged stuff on the shelves (if you’re braving the grocery store at all). So it’s no surprise that sourdough starters, yeast-baked projects, and homemade bread are trending.
But flour can be hard to come by in many parts of the country right now, which doesn’t help when you’ve got #distractibaking on the brain. Same goes for yeast, in some places. Thank goodness, then, that there are all sorts of tasty treats and baked goods you can make without all-purpose flour. Think: gorgeous pavlova dripping with seasonal berries; apple crisps; flourless chocolate cake!
The next time you hit the market, grab alternative flours like rice, buckwheat, almond and hazelnut. Scoop up any neat toppings or extras you usually might pass by. Grab the crystallized ginger, if you spy it, to make chocolate biscotti dredged in ginger. The sky is truly the limit, here. These are a few of our favorite (flour-free) things.
Is anyone really going to be disappointed when you break out a stunning pavlova for dessert on a Saturday night? (Just to distinguish it from Tuesday. Or eat it Tuesday; whatever!) Meringue-based desserts are divine. Use them as a way to get your chocolate fix, your mango fix, or whatever fix you need.
Fruit desserts: They can be as simple as peaches, slicked with olive oil and thrown on a grill. They can be as elegant as limoncello sorbet, seen here. Simply start with whatever you have in your home, whether it’s a bunch of overripe bananas, sweet apples or tiny berries. There’s a crisp, crumble, cobbler, or a panna cotta for you. Just look!
They look like they must contain flour, right? They do, but it’s brown rice flour. These pistachio sandies are a great example of how delicious this golden age of non-traditional flours can be. Consider buckwheat-blackberry linzer cookies, stunning Parisian macarons, and gluten-free hazelnut thumbprint cookies. Your local grocer is more likely than ever to have a stash of rice flour (for rhubarb-strawberry tarts!) and almond flour (for cobblers and crumbles!) There are even sweet polenta-based desserts to use up your stashes of apples and bananas.
Look for flourless desserts in our recipe database, but also search for “gluten-free“: You might encounter a few stunners. The chocolate torte above is easily flour-free if you dust your pan with an alternative flour. (Its base is hazelnuts!) And don’t forget about coconut macaroons, baked fruit, and that beloved classic of flourless chocolate cake.
It’s always a good idea to avoid wasting food, but never more so than now. If you have stale bread you don’t know what to do with, consider bread pudding. Almost any bread takes kindly to it, but particularly challah, brioche, baguette, and white loaves. We’re especially partial to this orange marmalade number, but you can make bread pudding without a recipe, too!
Cheesecake forever, folks. Whether you tuck into the blessedly flour-free Instant Pot cherry cheesecake shown here, or any other of our cheesecakes, give one a whirl. Because if ever there was a good time to break out of your baking rut, it’s right now.
2 comments
I think this is an informative article and it is very helpful and knowledgeable. I really enjoyed reading this article. Big fan, thank you!
Everything looks lovely. I’ll be trying to make some of them.