This article is part of Spring Bake, a collection of brand-new recipes and ideas that will keep you in cake, buns, and cookies until summer.
A year ago home cooks across the country dove their hands deep into bowls of dough. Perhaps to cope with growing pandemic-related anxiety, they watched over fledgling sourdough starters and nurtured dreams of future crusty loaves of rye.
Cut to March 2021, and you now have the greater portion of a bag of rye flour taking up space in your pantry. Or maybe it’s a bag of spelt flour. Or buckwheat. Or kamut. Einkorn? Heirloom cornmeal? Tapioca. I must admit I have all of the above. Despite my stash, last week I bought a very good, extra-long miche from my grocery delivery service. I do not feel ashamed.
So I find myself asking a question that may be on your mind, as well: How can I (purposefully, deliciously) use up the very nice bags of flour I’ve acquired over the last 12 months? And how can I get through them before the flour’s gone bad?
Luckily, the long list of great baking books continues to grow. Among these titles are cookbooks that exalt whole grain and grain-free flours as a way to add texture and flavorful dimension to breads, yes, but also to cakes, muffins, cookies, brownies, and more. Having so many flours, so many possible directions, and so little time (flour expires!), I realized a little expert guidance would be the best way for me to make a sizeable dent in my dry goods pantry. So I spoke to Roxana Jullapat, author of Mother Grains, which is a fantastic cookbook and guide to incorporating whole grain flour into your regular cooking routine.
Keep it fresh
The first step on your journey towards Total Flour Usage is to make sure the flour is still good. “There is fat in the germ of whole grain flour,” explains Jullapat, “and it can spoil. You’ll know it’s turned the corner if you open the bag and think: This smells funny.” That funny smell is rancidity—I liken it to the scent of a box of crayons (a little sour, a little papery or cardboardy, a little waxy). Rancid flour will bake up “with a synthetic flavor” says Jullapat, so it’s best to avoid it if you can.
However—and I’m sorry to have to bring this up—you may not be able to judge if a flour is rancid by in-the-bag smell test alone (especially if you’re unfamiliar with the stronger aromas some flours naturally possess). Sometimes you won’t notice off odors until the flour is heated. And there’s no real way around the conundrum besides trial and error. Bake a small batch of cookies or a single pancake (or even toast a small portion of flour in a dry pan). If it tastes stale or musty, rancidity is likely the issue. Note, a single rancid cookie won’t hurt you—it just won’t taste good. So the potential damage is really just aiming for your ego rather than your overall well-being.
To mitigate loss of flour, the best move is to keep all whole grain flours stashed in your fridge or freezer. “White flours should be fine at room temperature for quite a while,” says Jullapat, “as long as your house averages 68°F to 72°F and you keep it stored away from critters” it should last at least a year. Whole grain flours kept in the same condition (air tight container, steady mild temperature) tap out at just about 3 months. However, “you can keep whole grain flour in the refrigerator for up to a year,” she says, “and in the freezer, flour can live for years and years.”
If your flour has gone south, Jullapat says it makes great chicken feed. You can make playdough with it, too, if that’s something that interests you. It’s also a good compost addition, and—although I think no legitimate bread person would recommend this—I’ve had success using a small amount of slightly rancid flour as feed for my sourdough starter. The choice is in your hands.
Passed the fresh test? Then use it with abandon
Maybe you made one loaf of sourdough this winter and then decided bread baking wasn’t for you. Maybe you bought a specialty flour for a particular cake but then never actually got around to making that cake. Reader, now is the time to change your ways. Seize the day. Grab that flour and do something—anything.
So you don’t love making bread? Who cares! (Real question though: Have you considered that not all crusty loaves require a starter that you have to babysit?) There are loads of cookies, cakes, quick breads, and other delicious things that specifically call for whole grain flours. There are recipes beyond baking, too—more on those in a minute.
Jullapat likes to pair rye flour with ingredients that are “dark and delicious, like chocolate, coffee, molasses.” When she’s looking to use up some spelt, she tends toward brighter flavors, like citrus, stone fruit, and berries. She often thinks of buckwheat flour as an ingredient meant for spring, due to its “regenerative properties and relatively short growing season,” so she pairs it with springy produce: asparagus, rhubarb, fava beans, strawberries. But she also says that the dark nature of buckwheat flour means it has an affinity for chocolate and dark, late-summer berries, too.
With so many flours on hand, one thing I like to do is keep a Google spreadsheet inventory of my pantry. (It really helps if you happen to have WAY too many spices, too.) If I’m craving banana bread, I look to see what I need to use up. Of course, since I’ve made this Buckwheat Banana Cake a couple of times before, it doesn’t take me long to decide on a recipe. Or I can make a one-two punch in my flour pantry with Buckwheat-Rye Pancakes. Armed with Jullapat’s intel, that next round of pancakes may get a chocolate drizzle. Stay tuned to my Instagram for future developments.
Think outside the box
More good news: Jullapat says it’s not so difficult to swap one whole grain flour for another if the one you have isn’t the one that’s called for. There are a few caveats: “Making swaps in a recipe will require that you engage a little bit with your flour. You'll have to make some decisions and get to know it a little bit before jumping in.” Is the flour you’re holding on to a type of wheat, such as rye, barley, or spelt? These hearty flours aren’t all the same, but you can safely swap them in a recipe. Jullapat says you will notice some differences in texture and flavor from what the recipe developer might’ve intended—but she says that’s to be expected from brand to brand of even the same type of flour. “Open a bag of rye flour and you may be hit with a tart, earthy aroma; another rye might smell grassy—sometimes it’s hard to believe two such different flours come from the same grain.”
Spelt, she says, has a noticeable minerality, but also a creamy sweetness. If you have more than one flour to use up, make the same simple shortbread recipe with each so that you can really taste those differences and experience the changes in texture.
Similarly, you could try substituting other flours in the same family for one another (chickpea flour for lentil flour, for example, since they’re both legumes).
You can also incorporate whole grain flours into recipes that don’t call for them. Jullapat recommends swapping out no more than 25% of the total flour in your recipe for whatever whole grain you want to use. So, if a cake calls for 1 cup of all-purpose flour, you would use ¾ cup all-purpose and ¼ cup whole grain flour. “It’s possible to go up to 50% and still have a positive result,” she says, but you have to understand that “an all-white-flour cake is meant to be fluffy and light. When you swap that for a gluten free or low-gluten flour, you’ll lose some of that volume, but that loss of fluff will be compensated with flavor, or crunch, or whatever qualities the other flour has.”
You don’t have to be a baker
I would personally love for my morning kitchen to look like the pastry case of the town’s trendiest coffee shop—and frankly my afternoon and evening kitchen, too. But the truth is, I cannot keep myself in cake every day. (Or can I?)
For the odd time when cake is not the answer, whole grain flour can be used in savory ways, too. Add a little (or a lot) of tapioca, amaranth, or einkorn flour to your breading for fried chicken; or, dust a piece of fish with rye before pan searing (I’ve tried it, it’s delicious).
Jullapat also likes to work whole grain flours into her sauces. She says she recently made a Mornay, starting her roux with Triticale flour, a hybrid of whole wheat and rye. If Mornay—a rich, cheesy cream sauce—can start with whole grain flour, so can any stew or gravy that calls for an addition of flour. I recently subbed 25% buckwheat flour into my favorite biscuit recipe, then topped the result with a sausage and buckwheat flour gravy. 10/10 would do it again—so tender! So much flavor!
Jullapat also notes that many chefs are adding whole grain flours to homemade pastas and other types of noodles these days—and some noodles have always been made this way. Crackers, too, are a great way to use whole grain flour—and they make a very forgiving vehicle for mixing and matching whatever flours you might have on hand. Wouldn’t a pile of homemade crackers really up the ante of your charcuterie board game?
The goal, Jullapat says, is to “find a recipe that will guide you and produce something so delicious, so incredible, or so satisfying, that you're enticed to do even more with the whole grain flour you used.” If you can do that, you’ll get through that pile of mochiko, or sorghum flour, or red fife, or whatever else in no time. Mission accomplished.
