A Nutritious Ingredient in
Any Gluten Free Diet

Cooking and baking your own foods is a sure way to avoid gluten, specifically the protein gliadin. The following tips can make your foods tastier and more enjoyable.

• A lack of gluten makes your baked goods, including homemade cookies, dry and crumbly. You can easily minimize this shortcoming by adding additional egg white, extra leavening, or unflavored gelatin.

• As with wheat flour, blending of various gluten free flours is often necessary for optimal result.

There are many types of gluten free flours on the market. Soy flour, in particular, is gaining popularity because of its nutritional value. Naturally, I would be remiss not to mention it in this discussion of gluten free diet.

Percentage of Protein in Soy Flour Compared to Other Whole Grain Flours1

Soybean is not a grain, but a legume. Compared to wheat, it is high in proteins (between 40 - 50%), unsaturated and healthy fat (about 20%), and low in starch (15 - 20%). It also contains a high amount of calcium, iron, A and B vitamins. Unlike animal proteins, there is no cholesterol in soybeans.

Soy flour comes from either roasted or unroasted soybeans. One of the enzymes in unroated soy flour can oxidize carotenoids. Therefore, this flour is sometimes added to bread dough as a whitening agent.

Whether roasted or unroasted, soy flour comes either full-fat or defatted. The difference between them is the natural oil found in soy beans. Since this oil does not contain important nutrients, defatted soy flour is more nutritionally concentrated.


Cookies made with soy flour tend to brown quicker and are more tender. The extra moisture in soy flour extends the shelf life of homemade cookies. Do you know that a tablespoon of soy flour and a tablespoon of water can sometimes be used as a cholesterol-free substitute for a whole egg?

Not on a gluten free diet, but like soy flour? Substitute it for up to 15% of wheat flour in your cookie recipe. Your fried cookies, especially, won't be very greasy because soy flour absorbs less fat than any other flour when fried.

Bar cookies including brownies do not rely so much on gluten for quality and texture. They can thus accommodate a higher ratio of soy flour to wheat, usually 1 part soy flour to every 3 parts wheat flour.

REFERENCES

1. FIGONI, P. How Baking Works - Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science. First Edition, 2004. Wiley & Sons, Inc.

2. The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook. First Edition, 2003. The King Arthur Flour Company, Inc.