July 30, 2021 - 3:55am
millet quinoa and sorghum pancakes
Hello all, I've tried making millet, quinoa and sorghum pancakes and they have a bitter after taste. From which flour could that be? My sorghum is 70gm, millet & quinoa are 33g each followed by 1 tsp baking powder, and 4 tbsp sugar.
I have a pancake recipe with the abovementioned flour but with additional oat flour but I'd like to remove the oats. Anybody has experience working with these flours? Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks.
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Here's a web page that says toasting quinoa flour removes its bitter taste.
https://www.simplyquinoa.com/how-to-toast-quinoa-flour/
I have not tried it.
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Here's an article that says sorghum is bitter when used at levels over 10%:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590259820300418
Relevant quote:
"Taste scores decreased significantly as the level of sorghum flour increased characterized by a slightly bitter taste at a 10% or a greater added level of whole sorghum flour may be due to the phenolic compounds and tannins found in the seed-coat [39]."
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A friend of mine, a retired pro chef, who bakes GF for his wife, also confirms that quinoa is much improved by toasting the raw flour.
Thanks for this, I read about this before but it was too much work 😅 i don't think its the quinoa, my current pancake recipe uses quinoa, oats, millet and sorghum and there wasn't any bitter taste so when I remove the oats the bitter taste was there. Before all this I just use oats and millet and again the bitter taste is there so I suspect its the millet. Millet flour is expensive here I'm not using Bob's Red Mill just a normal brand from India.
A few years ago, I dabbled in non-wheat baking and used millet and sorghum flour. I learned that millet can be like cilantro-there are some people genetically prone to having millet taste very bitter. My husband thought the millet bread tasted nutty-I tasted very bitter. It was fresh millet flour-I obtained a new package from Bob's Red Mill customer service when I thought the bag I had was rancid. The fresh, new bag had the same issue.
I moved on to sorghum. It is supposed to be a great sub for flour in GF baking but I had the same problem. I did not find any documentation regarding a genetic tendency on that like I did with the cilantro and millet but I just couldn't use it.
So check the freshness dates, mix each flour, individually, with a little liquid (make 1 small pancake) and bake it up. If it is still bitter, you know which one it is. Raw millet and sorghum can be bitter so you need to cook it to determine if it is bitter.
BTW, I found brown teff to be very good. There is an ivory teff but I never tried that.
Good luck!
Thanks! Great info there! I have a baby food business selling dry pancake mix which consists of pearl millet flour, oat flour, sorghum and quinoa and the pancakes turn out great just a little crumbly, maybe due to lack of starch but I don't want any starch. There's a company that sells dry pancake mix and more or less has the same ingredients as ours but did not have any starch flours and I love their pancake honestly.
I have a customer that's allergic to oats so thats why I want to remove it. Bob's millet flour are too expensive here.
So are you still using sorghum flour? How does it work out? Does teff flour gives a brown colour to baked goods or pancakes?
Here's a web page (and a video) of how to "design your own" gluten-free flour mix:
http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/gluten-free-flour-mix/
Her method, or system, is to make a mix where 40% of the flour comes from a list of "protein flours" and 60% of the flour comes from a list of "starch flours."
Quinoa, millet, and sorghum are all on the list of "protein flours."
So, according to her method, you're missing some "starch flour."
Hope this helps.
This video was helpful thanks! Makes sense too, but I'd like to not have any starch in the dry mix, actually it works albeit a little crumbly. Now our pancake mix is made from oats, quinoa, pearl millet and sorghum, before I added sorghum it was so crumbly but it got better after adding the sorghum.
I've experimented a little with millet flour. But not for pancakes.
I purchased two kinds -- ragi and bajri -- at my local Patel Brothers grocery store here in the US.
If I remember correctly, ragi is the finger millet, and bajri is the pearl millet. Is that correct?
Did you try the other kind of millet?
And did you mean to say "from India, now living in another country" or "currently living in India" ?
When writing on the Internet "from /country-name/" is so confusing. :-)