Happy Chanukka!
Every year at Hanukka I make a very healthy version of sufganiot (hanukkah donuts). I mean very healthy. Usually it's blended bananas dehydrated into pancakes with homemade jelly rolled inside them. Of course my kids grew up like this, so they haven't felt like they're missing much, but now I've got kids in school and the others are older and I need to get a little more creative to compete with what everyone else is eating, (but still keep it as healthy as I can for me to feel good about giving it to them). So I started looking up recipes and comparing them to what I will allow and what I have in stock.
This is what I came up with .
The recipe called for:
tapioca flour
rice flour
yeast
So I used:
oat (flour)
and tapioca (flour)
and my teff sourdough starter that I always have on hand (because I bake a lot of pitot , challa, injera, torillas, pancakes and pizza dough among other things).
These are approximate amounts:
I started with :
4 cups oats (flour)
1/2 cup tapioca (flour)
1/2 cup sourdough starter
a teaspoon of:
salt
1 1/2 teaspoons of:
xanthan flour
baking powder
1/4 cup:
cane or coconut sugar
2 cups olive oil or coconut oil for cooking. Pour into a pan and let it heat up on medium fire.
I ground up both flours myself. I mixed it all up and I left it sitting on the counter for a few hours. In the evening, I put the oil in the pan and made balls for small donuts. I didn't know if this experiment would work, so I kept them small and it turned out beautifully. I might work just as well with larger donuts. Flip when ready and cook until browned on both sides. Remove from the oil and pile them on a plate. We just put jelly on them, but you could also pipe the jelly into them using a frosting pipe.
The kids asked me to repeat the recipe next year, so I guess it was a hit!
I figured out that the gf flours don't matter too much as long as you have baking powder and xanthan flour. It's easy to play with the amounts and still get pretty good results. It's important that it is allowed to sit and rise for a couple of hours. Now that I know it worked, I'll be better prepared next time and I will experiment with size and flavor variations. But we were very happy with the results! Enjoy.........
