I love playing with new ingredients
Trying out tastes and textures, seeing how they work and what flavour they bring to the table.
You can just imagine then, how excited I was to be contacted by lovely Tania http://www.mykitchenstories.com.au/ on behalf of the great guys from Lario International
http://www.lario.com.au/index.php?osCsid=449aa484f9fe5c78e0a1d20e841daa95 with the offer to try out some of the great new nut products that they have introduced to their range of artisan food items, sourced from some of the very best suppliers in Europe. Lucky me!
I recieved some lovely organic Lara Walnuts- an heirloom variety with a light coloured skin and sweet taste; also some Lara Walnut Flour with a nice silky texture; and some Piedmont Hazelnut Flour with a nice toasty colour and amazing depth of flavour.
To start things off I turned to the hazelnut flour for my first testing, leaving the walnuts for another day and another recipe- stay tuned!
I didn't really know much about nut flour- ground nuts or nut meal is something I use on a regular basis though, so I thought I should do my due diligence and find out. Enter Mr Google... and a whole heap of confusion!
I found out that the terms Nut Meal and Nut Flour seem to be used interchangeably in a lot of reipes and web sites although they are really two totally different products. Nearly all the recipes I found though called for what I call for nut Meal, with so called nut Flour sometimes just made from nuts that have being blanched first before grinding. Totally different from true Nut Flour indeed.
They are so different in character, that to help things out I thought I'd do a little Show-And-Tell about my findings:
Hazelnut MEAL or GROUND Hazelnuts are made from ground up hazlenuts- that's it, nothing added or taken away. Skins usually left on, and all natural oils intact. Nice and mild tasting.
Hazelnut FLOUR is the by-product from hazelnut oil production. It can also be known as 'defatted' flour as the oil has already been extracted from the nuts before drying and grinding. Much tastier than the meal with a lovely toasted flavour, lighter and dryer in texture too. Not as fine as 'regular' flour though.
I really wanted to see how the hazelnut flour worked in baking, but didn't want to screw up a whole heap of ingredients if I was on the wrong track. The best way to do this was to take a pseudo-scientific approach with an experiment of a nice basic butter cake- one with hazelnut meal, one with hazelnut flour and one with gluten free flour as a control. I bet the guys at MythBusters would be proud of me!
Exactly the same except for the flour content, ready to go:
This is the end result:
As you can see, the Nut Meal cake is very moist and dense even sinking on top a little, the Nut Flour cake is a lot lighter indeed and not so wet and has a better crumb and firmer crust, and as expected the gluten free flour cake is very light and fluffy.
I don't think the two products could be substituted for each other very well at all, the added moisture and heaviness of the meal would be a real problem while the nut flour is tastier and dryer overall
Hmmmm.....
I loved the toasty taste from the Nut Flour, but it still needed a bit of lift.....
Perfect solution- mix the Nut Flour and gluten free flour together!
Hazelnut Flour Buttercake with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
Cake Ingredients:
3/4 cup Hazlenut Flour
3/4 cup gluten free Flour
1 cup Castor Sugar
3 Eggs
125g Butter or lactose free substitute
1/2 cup lactose free Milk or substitute
2 tsp gluten free Baking Powder
2 tsp Vanilla Extract
For the Buttercream recipe, check out this older post.
For the chocolate taste I added in some dark chocolate to the milk mix while it was still warm and stirred it through to melt nicely
http://intolerantchef.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/buttercream.html
For the cake you simply place all the ingredients into a large bowl
Now mix it for a few minutes until it's nice and fluffy and light.
How easy is that, right?
Pop it into a greased and lined pan, then bake at about 160*C for 70 minutes or so, or until the top springs back when you touch it lightly, and a skewer comes out clean from the middle. The nut flour gives it a nice dark colour so just be a bit careful and don't think that the cake is ready as soon as it's nice and lightly golden
Let it cool completely on a rack
Due to a baking-pan-mishap over Christmas, the pan I used was really a bit too big for this cake. Not wanting a flat pancakey type of thing, I solved my problem by splitting the cake into layers and slathering on plenty of buttercream frosting. I ask you, is there any problem that buttercream frosting can't fix? :)
TaaDaaa! They never need know....
This turned out to be a perfectly wonderful cake with loads of hazelnut flavour and light and fluffy to boot. The buttercream frosting was nice and silky without being overwhelming and it was certainly rich indeed!
A chocolate ganache would also be good- if you served smaller slices! But this was fine and really let the taste of the hazelnuts shine through.
I found the Hazelnut flour to be a great baking ingredient, adding loads of flavour and colour to an otherwise quite plain cake. It does need the 'regular' gluten free flour to carry it though- just for the lightness and lift that baking so often needs.
I'm going to have fun playing around with this lovely nut flour and making more adventurous recipes than this, and have a couple of other nut products to review for Lario as well- so Dear Readers, Stay Tuned!
So Dear Readers, have you ever tried Nut Flour before, and do you have any recipe hints?
Disclosure:
Nuts and Nut Flour supplied by Lario International - Thanks guys!
http://www.lario.com.au/nuts-hazelnut-flour-defatted-pariani-p-409.html?osCsid=449aa484f9fe5c78e0a1d20e841daa95
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