If you'd like to incorporate some interesting new flours into your baking, especially non-wheat flours, a good one to start with is sorghum. It's definitely one of my favorites, but now I have a new one to add to the list -- millet flour. I just made a batch of Millet Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies, and they are so good! They are beautiful, chewy peanut butter cookies with lots of cracks and crevices. The main flavor in the cookies is peanut butter rather than millet, but the millet flour gives them a crackly appearance and lets you skip the wheat.
Baking With Millet
Millet, which you may associate with birdseed, is a seed that acts like a grain. It's considered easily digestible, so it's become popular in gluten-free baking. And thanks to that popularity, it is more readily available. I've seen it at Wegmans and Whole Foods, and there are lots of different brands you can order. Just be careful ordering on-line and don't accidentally order millet rather than millet flour like I did. Whoops. Luckily it was easy to grind into flour (unlike Teff, which I also accidentally ordered in its whole form).
Millet can be boiled and eaten like quinoa, and I intend to try it since I now have a 3 pound bag, but I've mainly been using millet flour. In baking, its properties include adding a touch of sweetness, helping with rise and structure and adding a slightly sweet flavor. I've also heard it described as nutty, but I'm trying to get away from using "nutty" as a descriptor because it's so vague. If nutty, which nut? I'll have to eat another cookie and try to figure it out.
Here's another photo of the cookie. The cookie in the photo above was made with Bob's Red Mill (the original source of the recipe) and the cookie below was made with the Anthony's brand millet that I ground into flour myself.
As far as gluten-free peanut butter cookies go, these are terrific and don't have a gritty texture. Fuzz commented on the flavor, so I think she could probably detect the flavor of the millet better than I could, and we all agreed that milk chocolate chips would be just as good as semisweet, so for the next round I'll try those.
Recipe
Millet Flour Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- ¾ cup millet flour (120 grams)
- ¼ cup tapioca flour (30 grams)
- ½ tsp baking soda (3 grams)
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 stick unsalted butter softened (114 grams)
- ¾ cup creamy peanut butter unsweetened (200 g)
- ¼ cup granulated sugar (60 grams)
- ¾ cup packed brown sugar (165 grams)
- 1 egg (50 grams)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup semisweet or milk chocolate chips (225 grams)
Instructions
- Whisk together flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
- With an electric mixer, beat the butter, peanut butter and sugars until creamy. Add egg and vanilla and beat until light and fluffy.
- Add the flour mixture and stir until blended.
- Stir in chocolate chips. Cover and chill dough for about a half hour or until ready to use.
- Preheat oven to 350°F. (375 also works).
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using a medium size cookie scoop, scoop up balls of dough and arrange about 2 ½ inches apart on the baking sheet.
- Bake for 12–15 minutes, or until the edges begin to brown. Let cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling.
Anna
I love reading about everyone's experience with recipes and specific details like these. It really sounds like the millet cookies recipe is an awesome way to use cassava flour. I don't have much experience with Egg Replacer, but I have some and will try it. As for being fool-proof, I guess that's how recipes make it to back-of-the bag status.
Kate U
These are apparently fool-proof. I used casava flour instead of tapioca, crunchy peanut butter, Miss Jones Smart Sugar (for the white sugar only), Bob's Red Mill vegan egg replacer, and vegan butter (I halved the salt since it wasn't unsalted). I make substitutions in muffins all the time, so I'm pretty familiar with what will turn out and what won't.
Where I really messed up is that like a muffin recipe, I put all the dry ingredients together and all the wet together. I also don't have an electric mixer, so I did my best to "cream" the two butters together by hand and made a wish before adding it to the dry ingredients. Refrigerated the dough for a couple hours and the dough was so hard and dry looking, I thought they were going to turn it terribly texture-wise. I don't have a cookie scoop, so I made balls with my hands about the size of a donut hole. I ended up having to cook them for nearly 20 minutes (increased the oven to 375 for the last 4 ish minutes) because they were still such high mounds with zero browning even at 15 minutes. I think that's my oven's fault or maybe I made the dough balls too dense/tight.
After all this, they turned out fabulous! I will definitely make these again (and hopefully I'll follow directions better next time. Just be sure to have a glass of milk (we like oat milk) on hand because these are incredibly rich. Yum!
Anna
I liked them too, and I wonder if using the cassava flour like you did made them even better! I'd go try it right now, I only have regular tapioca flour.
Jeanie
These cookies have that best cookie mouth feel. They are incredible!!! Thanks for this recipe. I did make some substitutions to use what I had on hand; I used cassava flour in place of the tapioca flour.