Coconuts and Ducks

You know the expression, “if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck and acts and looks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck”? I’m beginning to think that coconut flour falls into the duck category. Because no matter how hard I try and no matter who I talk to, I, and it seems many others, can not get coconut flour to behave like any other flour. The end product when baking with coconut flour is, for lack of a better word, unique. No matter how many things you throw at it, it is an obstinate flour. Just as you can not make a shy child outgoing or pretend that carob really tastes like chocolate, you can’t make coconut flour other than what it is.

I set out again to make the coconut pancakes, this time following Paleo expert Mark Sisson’s Coconut Pancake recipe which calls for the following ingredients:
4 eggs
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1 pinch nutmeg
1 pinch cinnamon
1 tablespoon honey
1/4 cup coconut milk (full fat)

Remember the important advice about reading the fine print? It wasn’t until I was well into the recipe that I realized Sisson called these pancakes crepes. The end result of this recipe was a loose batter that produced a crepe that frankly tasted like scrambled eggs. I didn’t really see the point. I might as well have had plain eggs.

I am as stubborn as coconut flour so the goal for my next go around was to produce a thicker batter that actually tasted like a pancake. I used the following ingredients:

1/4 cup coconut flour
1 cup egg beaters (I typically don’t use this product, but my daughter bought it and I didn’t want to throw it out. Next time I would opt for plain egg whites)
1 tsp chia seeds
1 Tbl maca powder
1 Tbl raw cacao
2 Tbl Gogi berries
Cinnamon
Choc chips

This recipe yielded 6 slightly spongey yet edible pancakes. I did not get rave reviews, but it was my best results to date.

So, where do I go from here? Do I accept the true nature of coconut flour and work around it? Or should I just adjust my expectations? You can’t sit down to enjoy a bowl of spaghetti squash and think it’s going to taste just like pasta. And please let’s not pretend that soy cheese and rice ice cream taste like the real thing. Coconut flour and me. Maybe expecting less will lead to a whole new world of cocnutty opportunities.