Healthy sweet pastry

In my quest to reduce saturated fats from my diet, particularly palm fat and hydrogenated oils, I have been investigating using finely ground up nuts to provide a shortening to pastry bases.

I totally cracked it with my mince tarts :)

OK, I got to get quantities sorted out, but this is the basic recipe.

Finely ground nuts (cashews, brazils, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts) (ground to flour basically)
Finely ground whole oats (ground to flour basically)
Wheat flour
Sprinkling of sugar
Enough sunflower oil to get the mixture to a breadcrumb state
Water to mix it all to a dough.

It's approximately equal quantities of nuts to flour and oats. Make it like you would normal pastry. It is very short when you are rolling it out, but goes to a nice biscuity texture when cooked - crisp and short at the same time. After cooking allow to cool a little before moving, as it will be a little soft and crumbly until cooled. It doesn't taste nutty to me when cooked - it would do if you used peanuts, though.

It should work with more sugar as a biscuit and no sugar as a savoury pastry, too.

That sounds good! I have seen similar recipes to that in raw food recipe sites, they use all nuts.

Yeah I can see that would probably work just drying it out rather than heating it.

Have you got a link to any recipes?

No, I didn't save any (as I don't bake really bake) but I'm sure you can find one on Google.

Okays I worked out the right measures of things today:

This is a good amount for about 30 small tarts, or 1 large tart.

60g unsalted mixed nuts (try not to use too many almonds or it will taste like marzipan!)
40g unsalted cashews
75g whole jumbo oats

100g wheat flour
25g sugar
2 tablespoon sunflower oil.

Grind the nuts and oats to powder with a coffee bean grinder.
Mix the flour and sugar in well, then stir in the oil. Rub everything together between your fingers to make sure it is mixed well.

Drizzle a tiny amount of water in at a time until you can make a nice dough ball. Then add a little more water and mix it in well. If it is too crumbly when you roll it out, it needs to be a bit wetter.

For small tarts, roll it out on floured surface to a thickness of about 3mm and press out small rounds.

For a single large tart just press it into the pie dish, as it won't hold up to being rolled that big probably.

This sounds delicious! I can't wait to try it. (I imagine this recipe would also be a good protein source given the nuts in it.)

Yeah, I reckon it should be.

I might try it with different flours, too, like chickpea or lentil flour.

Pob, did you make those for VBB's party?

Yeah, the pastry for the mince tarts and lemon tarts was made like that.

Could have ended in a fatality as Jamie's colleague is allergic to nuts and it's probably not obvious that lemon tarts might have nuts in. Luckily he asked if they had nuts in. :cool:

Quote:

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Pob

Yeah, the pastry for the mince tarts was made like that.

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They were really nice:) I didn't see the lemon ones.

I think Sam was guarding the lemon ones ;)

Hi Pob,
Your pastry research sounds really interesting, thanks for sharing. I was wondering if you have ever used chestnut flour? Maybe it would work well in this kind of recipe. In Corsica they produce it and use it in their recipes and you can get it in healthfood stores.