This flour made from ground chickpeas is great to coat vegetables for pakoras or to make flatbreads. It is pale yellow and powdery and has an earthy flavour best suited to savoury dishes. Gram flour contains no gluten. It is widely used in Indian cookery.
How to Use Chickpea Flour. Chickpea flour can be used as a binding ingredient in fritters and veggie burgers, as a thickener for sauces, soups and stews, for making flatbreads and batter-based foods like pancakes and waffles, and to make batters for deep-frying other foods.
Corn flour is made by finely grinding whole corn kernels, whereas cornstarch is made just from the starchy part of corn. As a result, corn flour contains protein, fiber, starch, vitamins, and minerals, whereas cornstarch is mostly carbs.
Processing.
| Cornstarch | Corn flour |
|---|
| Fiber | 0 grams | 2 grams |
Muffins, Cookies, and Quick BreadsThough you can mix it with other flours (gluten-free or regular) to add complexity in flavor, chickpea flour is sturdy enough to do the heavy lifting in baking all by itself. Try a 1 to 1 swap for flour in blender muffins, pumpkin bread, or sunflower butter breakfast cookies.
Either cake flour or pastry flour can be used as a 1:1 substitute for all-purpose flour in most baking recipes. Steer away from cake flour for chewy bread baking, though, and opt instead for bread or whole-wheat flour for your no-knead and sourdough loaves.
When flour goes rancid, its molecular structure changes — which may produce harmful compounds. However, no recent studies have revealed any detrimental effects of eating rancid flour. Although cooked foods made with it may taste unpleasant, they're unlikely to harm your health if eaten in small amounts.
Gram flour has certain properties that treat acne and has been used for this purpose in India for centuries. For one, the zinc in besan has been shown to fight the infections that cause your face to erupt with acne. Secondly, it also helps control excess sebum production and soothes inflamed skin.
Rice Flour (Gluten-Free)You can get white or brown rice flour. Brown has a slightly nuttier taste and grittier texture.
And it makes for a gloriously crunchy coating. “Besan flour doesn't go super golden brown. What it does do, it goes super crunchy,†says Schofield in Outback Gourmet, when she uses a besan-flour batter to her chickpea-battered chicken (think super-sized, tender chicken nuggets).
The best way to determine whether your flour is safe is to smell it. While fresh flour has a neutral odor, bad flour smells off — it can be stale, musty, or almost sour. It may also look discolored. Additionally, if your flour has come into contact with water or moisture, large clumps of mold may appear.
Top 5 Chickpea Flour Substitutes
- Quinoa Flour As a Chickpea Substitution. A bowl of Quinola flour.
- Oat Flour As a Chickpea Flour Substitution. A bowl of oat flour.
- Almond Flour As a Chickpea Flour Substitution. A bowl of almond flour.
- Millet Flour As a Chickpea Flour Substitution. A bowl of millet flour.
Chickpea flour is higher in protein than other flours, including white and whole-wheat flour. A 1-cup (92-gram) serving of chickpea flour provides 20 grams of protein, compared to 13 grams in white flour and 16 grams in whole-wheat flour ( 1 ).
Best Gram Flour Substitutes To Try Right Now
- Quinoa flour.
- Tapioca flour.
- Buckwheat flour.
- Lentil flour.
- Soybean flour.
Gram flour or besan is a pulse flour made from a type of ground chickpea called the gram chickpea.
It's also a great thickening agent. Use cornflour as a substitute for gram flour in almost any recipe. It is, however, a little too dense to make dishes like Pakoras or Cheela. Your meals will also have a richness to them, thanks to the subtle flavor of corn.
