Coconut Flour Pancakes

September 21, 2012 Lisa Durbin

I like wheat flour, don’t get me wrong. One of my favourite things in the world is homemade crusty bread still warm from the oven, slathered in butter. Sadly, wheat doesn’t like me all that much. If I have it in large quantities, it makes me bloated, irritates my eczema, and generally gives me a bad time. What a sad tale of unrequited love.

Often my food mantra is “eat the real thing every once in a while or don’t bother.” I have the luxury of being able to treat myself with “real” cake if I want to, unlike a celiac or someone with a wheat allergy. Substitutes are often poor and not worth the effort or cost, but when you don’t have a choice and don’t want to feel deprived, it’s worth the experimentation to find something worthwhile.

Being Canadian, pancakes are a part of my psyche. Big, fat, fluffy buttermilk pancakes drowning in real maple syrup are my idea of breakfast heaven. I’ve tried quite a few recipes using ground almonds and coconut flour instead of wheat flour, and most of them have been pretty dire. The problem with non-grain flours is that they require a lot of moisture, usually in the form of eggs. This tends to give you something that tastes like an overcooked omelette.

I came across a recipe for coconut flour pancakes on Nourishing Days (http://www.nourishingdays.com/2010/07/fluffy-coconut-flour-pancakes/) via a Google search. The photo of the lovely fluffy, non-omelettey looking pancakes encouraged me to give this a go and I’m so glad I did. Although these will never taste exactly like the real thing, they are light and delicious and a very close second. I’ve kept these in the fridge for a couple of days and reheated them in the microwave, and they were still tasty.

If you’ve never used coconut flour before and are horrified by the taste of coconut, fear not – the flour doesn’t taste at all like coconut, for some weird reason. You can find it in health food stores and some supermarkets now carry it in the specialty flour section. In the UK, it can only be bought online for about the same price as a Smart Car.

I topped mine with a big blob of Total/Fage 0% Greek yoghurt and strawberries, but let your imagination run wild.

Coconut Flour Pancakes

Ingredients

4 large eggs (at room temperature)
1 cup milk
2 tsps vanilla extract
1 Tbsp honey or whatever sweetener/sugar you’d like to use
1/2 cup coconut flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
Coconut oil or butter for frying

Method

Preheat the griddle or frying pan over medium-low heat.

In a small bowl, beat the eggs until frothy.

I did this in the KitchenAid, for about 2 minutes, which really added a lot of air into the eggs and helps keep the pancakes light.

Stir in the milk, vanilla, and sweetener/sugar.

In another bowl, sift in the coconut flour, baking soda, and sea salt and whisk together to combine.

Fold the wet mixture into the dry until the coconut flour is incorporated.

Grease the frying pan with butter or coconut oil.

Ladle a few tablespoons of batter into the pan and spread slightly with the back of a spoon.

The pancake batter will be fairly thick and won’t pour the same way as a traditional pancake batter.

Cook for a few minutes on each side until the tops dry out slightly and the bottoms start to brown. Flip and cook an additional 2-3 minutes on the other side.

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