Exciting New Alternative Flours

As a professional baker, understanding alternative flours is essential for adapting to changing consumer demands, whether for gluten-free, low-carb, or simply more nutritious products. Alternative flours can significantly affect the texture, flavor, and structure of baked goods, so it’s important to know how to use them effectively. 

As a baker, working with alternative flours can be both exciting and challenging. Each type of alternative flour has its own characteristics, which can affect the texture, flavor, and overall performance of the final baked goods. Here are some of the most common challenges bakers face with alternative flours and what is new in this field. 

Challenges

Most alternative flours, like almond, coconut, or rice flour, lack gluten, a key protein in wheat flour that provides structure and elasticity to baked goods. This can result in a crumbly texture and a lack of cohesion in the dough, but also a difference in texture: gluten-free flours often produce a denser or grittier texture, which can be challenging when aiming for light and airy baked goods. Without gluten, alternative flours require additional binders like xanthan gum, guar gum, or eggs to help hold the dough together.

In terms of moisture absorption, alternative flours like coconut flour absorb significantly more liquid than traditional wheat flour, requiring adjustments to liquid ratios in recipes. This can make doughs too dry or too wet if not properly balanced. The varying absorption rates can lead to inconsistency in the final product, especially if the moisture content of the flour itself varies slightly from batch to batch. And, in general, when it comes to reformulation, everything is a challenge: recipes developed with traditional wheat flour don’t always convert easily to alternative flours, requiring significant experimentation to achieve the desired outcome. Bakers must often adjust the amount of flour, liquid, and leavening agents, as they behave differently in terms of rising, binding, and moisture retention. 

Alternative flours have distinct flavors from wheat: e.g., the nuttiness of almond flour or the sweetness of coconut flour, which can overpower the desired taste of the baked goods, while flours like buckwheat or teff can give baked goods a darker color, which might be undesirable for certain recipes. 

Another challenge comes from the short shelf life of nut-based flours, which have a higher fat content, making them more prone to rancidity. Alternative flours are also often more expensive than traditional wheat flour, which can increase the cost of production, especially for small-scale bakers. Last but not least, baking with alternative flours often involves learning new techniques and understanding the specific characteristics of each flour, which can be time-consuming and frustrating for those accustomed to traditional baking methods. 

Despite these challenges, alternative flours offer a range of benefits, including catering to dietary restrictions, providing unique flavors, and adding nutritional variety. That is one of the reasons new products are being developed all the time, so bakers and customers have more options.

New Flours

An innovative start-up company, PhenOlives, is the first in the world to have developed and patented a process for stopping the oxidation of the olive oil waste – a critical step in then being able to use the waste (which accounts for 85% of the olive oil production itself) for making olive flour. Olive flour, according to Chen Lev-Ari, the PhenOlives CEO, fulfills many of the requirements of today’s customers: is gluten-free, high fiber (82%), low-calorie, has high polyphenols (which are full of antioxidants) and, most importantly in bakery, it has a neutral taste. No new crop is grown – just the waste of olive oil production is used – resulting in a price equivalent or similar with other gluten free flours.

Read the rest of the story in the new issue of World Bakers Digital!