Complete Failure: Making Low-Carb Bread with Gram Flour

My diet has tended to extreme starchiness over the years; I can consume massive quantities of pasta and bread in the course of a day and I've been known to eat a flour tortilla with nothing on it but a little butter. As a result I am overweight. Hence I've been striving to reduce the amount of starch in my diet, not necessarily in any sort of extreme Atkins-ish way and certainly not by going over to an exclusive diet of beef and bacon as some foolish persons do, but rather by choosing dishes that don't require a lot of starch in the first place: salads instead of sandwiches, vegetables as a side dish instead of pasta.

Still, it's hard to live with less bread; I'm one of those persons for whom almost any foodstuff is improved by placing it between two pieces of bread or wrapping it in a flour tortilla. (Flour, always, never corn. Corn tortillas are mealy and gross.) When the Atkins craze was at its height there were a couple of brands of sandwich bread advertising themselves as "low-carb"; both were expensive and both were not very good to eat and in any case neither is sold in the markets here any more, now that the fad is dead. There's one brand of low-carb tortilla that's not awful and can still be found but again it's expensive and in any case, while tortillas are nice, they're just not as tempting and versatile as a loaf of bread.

How hard could it be, I've thought, to make low-carb bread? One can shave a few grams of starch per serving off by using a whole-grain cereal flour; using coarse rye flour, for example, is somewhat higher in fiber and lower in starch than whole wheat flour. But other flours made from legumes or from "pseudo-cereals" such as quinoa are even lower in starch. They're widely used in gluten-free baking, in which I have next to no interest, and in any case "gluten-free" and "low-carb" are two different goals. Gluten-free flour mixes tend to rely heavily on rice and potato flours which are just as starchy as wheat flour. My hope was to come up with some mixture of a high-protein non-wheat flour, such as soy flour, with enough gluten flour to hold the bread together in a semi-normal fashion.

I've found that the easiest and cheapest of these flours to get locally is gram flour, which goes by a bunch of other names; it's a fine meal made from ground-up chickpeas. At a nearby international grocery store I can get it in four-pound bags for a little more than a dollar per pound, which isn't bad and much much cheaper than buying those horribly overpriced little sacks of Bob's Red Mill flours. I've found gram flour of two sorts at that market, a coarser whole-grain variety and an extra-fine variety called besan flour. I've tried both in bread recipes. Neither worked.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time giving recipes that resulted in utter failure but I'll describe generally my approach to trying to use these flours if only so some reader will know what not to do in future. My hope was that a mixture of the gram flour with wheat gluten flour in an approximately 6:1 to 8:1 ratio could be used directly to replace wheat flour in a bread recipe.

I tried this first with a very simple white bread recipe that's given me excellent results in the past when made with wheat flour; basically it's just warm water, salt, yeast, and flour. For this I tried the coarse gram flour. The resulting dough was completely intractable and abominably sticky; attempting to knead it in my stand mixer with the bread hook only plastered the stuff against the sides of the bowl and no real kneading action ever took place, even with the addition of more gluten flour in an attempt to make the dough more cohesive. Worse, it scarcely rose on standing in a warm oven. I suspect I know why: in the absence of any added sugar to a bread dough the source of sugar for the yeast's fermentation comes from the starch in the flour, slowly broken down by amylases produced by the yeast. But the low-starch gram and gluten flours didn't give the yeast enough to work with so the resulting dough never rose.

Therefore for my second try I thought I might have a better chance with a bread recipe with added sugar to encourage the yeast to rise. Furthermore I hypothesized that the fine-ground besan flour would yield a more tractable dough than the coarse gram flour I had tried earlier. This time I chose to modify a recipe intended for a rye bread. Most rye bread recipes I've encountered add brown sugar or molasses (or both), partly for flavor but also because the denser, stickier rye doughs seem to need a bit more help in rising. The results? Only very slightly better. The dough had at least enough tenacity that it stayed more or less in a mass that the dough hook could actually work on instead of just getting mashed against the sides of the bowl to stay there, but it showed an incredible ability to swallow up many cups of the besan flour without much diminishing in stickiness. An ordinary wheat flour dough will undergo a rather sharp change in consistency as more flour is kneaded into it, losing its stickiness and pulling away from the sides of the bowl rather than tending to cling, and forming into a ball that can be handled easily. This besan flour dough never behaved that way. Adding more and yet more besan flour, with a little sprinkling of gluten flour as well in the hope it would help, did gradually lessen the stickiness of the dough but even at best it still clung tenaciously to the bowl. Eventually in frustration I scooped it out with a spatula and into a bread pan as though it were a very thick and heavy "batter bread" and let it rise. To my surprise it actually did rise a bit but by no more than about half of its original volume--really you want it to double. The resulting bread was actually somewhat bready in texture, if very dense, but then I realized that making bread with chickpea flour was doomed to fail for a much more fundamental reason: the loaf tasted foul. The optimistic description on the Bob's Red Mill bag talks of its "nutty flavor" and there was some nuttiness there but also a very unpleasant earthy taste. The mouth feel of the bread was all wrong, too; it seemed to cling to and coat the tongue like clay. In any case, just as inedible as the previous loaf.

I suspect my mate Misha is correct. She pointed out before I started on these gram flour experiments that thousands of well-paid professionals have worked on the problem of making an edible low-carb bread and failed miserably. What hope did I have?