I don't have many failures in the kitchen, and in that I count myself lucky. Unfortunately, tonight I tried to use coconut flour for the first time without looking it up, and ended up with a spectacular mess. I thought I should share this disaster, seeing as all these new types of flour are becoming more readily available in supermarkets everywhere - which is a good thing, trust me, but we have to do our research!
The recipe I used is one that I use quite frequently, and my only mistake was that I tried to use the same amount of coconut flour to replace the wheat flour, without compensating for the complete lack of gluten or high absorbency in coconut flour. The smell of the flour was INSANELY delicious, and we'd heard all about how full of fibre it was, and how low GI it was, so we couldn't wait to get started.
And here's where I added only one egg as per normal, when I should have had about 6 or 7.
And here's where it clumps out messily - Just to get it to that consistency, I added a litre of milk and a litre of water!
Even though I knew it would end in tears, I decided to bake it anyway to see what would happen. Et voila! Absolutely nothing to hold the mixture together. It was also cooked on the outside and raw on the inside. When we finally manoeuvred the muffins out of the tins, we gave them a go. It was seriously like eating wet dessicated coconut, and we couldn't even taste the pumpkin!
After doing some research, I've found that coconut flour performs at its best when paired with another flour (such as wheat), or when used with a truckload of eggs. I really hated wasting all those ingredients, but at least a lesson was learned that I don't think I'll be forgetting any time soon.
What's your worst, most spectacular culinary failure?
