This seems like a place you low carb guys will like this..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-knead-no-carb-bread-it-might-cost-you-some-dough-11582481459?mod=hp_featst_pos3Instead of wheat flour, Veronica Culver’s ultra-low-carb bread recipe calls for five eggs, six tablespoons of finely ground almonds and half a cup of powdered collagen, a protein found in animal bones and tissues.
Bake for 40 minutes, and then cool for an hour. Upside down.
Otherwise, “as soon as it starts to cool, you can literally watch it start to sink in the middle,” said Ms. Culver, of Newport Beach, Calif., who spent nine months perfecting the recipe after pining for bread on her carb-cutting diet. “Then it’s just like, OK, it’s still edible, but it’s not at all what you think it should be.”
The quest to make better low-carb bread is heating up, and amateur cooks, food startups and grocery chains are seeking out increasingly exotic ingredients for the perfect loaf. Regular bread, made from high-carb wheat, is verboten on the low-carb diets that are becoming more mainstream, so bakers are trying all kinds of workarounds to see how low they can go—even to zero.
Ingredients ranging from unripe green bananas to lupin beans are on the table. Woolworths, the biggest grocery chain in Australia, sells a low-carb bread made with bamboo fiber. In the U.S., grocery store Aldi used oat and chicory-root fiber to create a bread it advertises as having “zero net carbs,” meaning the only carbs are from dietary fiber.
There is a challenge: These ingredients don’t always behave in the oven. Loaves sometimes expand so rapidly they pop out of the baking dish. Some are so brittle that cracks develop inside. Others just taste miserable.
Heath Squier, chief executive at Julian Bakery in Oceanside, Calif., wanted to cut more carbs out of his company’s already low-carb offerings. So last year, the company rolled out a new loaf largely made with almond flour, eggs, butter—and cream cheese, which helps offset the eggy flavor. Each slice has 140 calories.
Three loaves cost $40, including shipping. Slices have zero net carbs, according to the packaging. A typical slice of white bread has about 12 grams of carbs.
“The biggest thing when you’re making something from eggs is to get it to taste good,” said Mr. Squier, who markets the bread to customers following an ultra-low-carb diet called the ketogenic diet. “You don’t want it to taste like whole eggs.”
Venerdi, a bakery in New Zealand, at first tried to make its own keto-friendly bread using cauliflower, walnuts and egg whites, but the loaves didn’t have enough volume. When more egg whites were added, the bread blew up so big in the oven that it touched the tray above, there were big holes in the loaves and it seemed a bit wet inside, said Arthur Nagot, a food technologist at the bakery.
Later, the bakery tried using the powderized tuber-like stem of the konjac plant, an ingredient found in Asian cuisine. But it sucked up so much water that when the bread was sliced, “it looked like silicon, globs of silicon and glue all through it,” said Stewart Jessiman, head of new product development at Venerdi. “It was terrible.”
The bakery finally came up with a recipe that uses a tapioca starch that “resists digestion,” as well as green banana flour and psyllium, a fiber made from the husks of seeds. The konjac powder made it in, though it makes up only 1.4% of the ingredients. Net carbs: less than three grams per slice. Each loaf costs nearly $7 online, excluding shipping.
Low-carb diets are still controversial among health professionals. Some studies show they can help people lose weight in the short term, but the long-term impacts are unclear.
The perfect low-carb recipe could make some serious dough. In recent years, sales have barely risen in the roughly $16 billion U.S. bread market because consumers are shifting to foods perceived to be healthier, according to market-research firm Packaged Facts. Grain-free breads, many of which are also low-carb, could be one big growth area, it said.
Wheat flour is so good for baking bread because of gluten, said Richard Charpentier, a baker in Philadelphia who previously worked in research and development at Wonder Bread-owner Flowers Foods Inc. Yeast eats sugars in the dough, releases gases, and then gluten, a protein, acts like a balloon that stretches and allows the bread to rise.
Instead of wheat, low-carb bakers must use other ingredients such as eggs, fibers and gums—even a purer form of gluten stripped of most carbs—to create a structure for the bread, said Mr. Charpentier, who now runs his own consulting firm. Instead of yeast, baking powder can be used to create a chemical reaction to release gas.
Kevin Bae, 53, tried to make low-carb buns one night in his suburban Chicago kitchen. He found a recipe online but didn’t have one key ingredient, psyllium, in his pantry. Instead, he used something else he had on hand: xanthan gum, a common food thickener.
“They looked pretty good in the oven and then when I went to open it, it was like, ‘Hey, these things are hollow,’” he said. “It is like somebody stuck a straw in there and blew some air inside the bun.”
Kevin Bae, with his dog Godfrey, and his failed keto hamburger buns PHOTOS: KEVIN BAE(2)
He ate his burgers without buns that night, but not all was lost. He created his own low-carb recipe for popovers, a type of roll, based on the goof up.
Old-fashioned bread lovers aren’t impressed. Ken Forkish, author of “Flour Water Salt Yeast” and owner of a bakery and pizzeria in Portland, Ore., uses almond flour to make macarons--but only because that is the traditional recipe.
“Bread has been a foundational food in the Western world for thousands of years,” Mr. Forkish said. “Low-carb bread, it sounds like something that someone thought up strictly to create a new category for selling something.”
Ms. Culver, who sells collagen-based brownies online at the Enchanted Cook Keto Bakery website, concedes her zero-net-carb bread might taste too light and eggy for people used to regular bread. Her husband refuses to eat it unless she makes modifications such as increasing the almond flour, which adds more texture but also increases the carbs.
“But if you’re someone who doesn’t eat bread because of the carbs, you’re going to be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m having bread again,’” she said.
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