Adventures and misadventures with oat flour

I've recently went wheat-less, not because of some fashionable trend or because there is anything innately wrong with wheat, rather after 10 years of excuses and foot dragging, I finally got tested for food sensitivity and wheat came up as a big no no, ugh, I love bread!  The non-wheat 'flours' at my local grocery store are atrociously priced and I'm not big on 'fake' substitutions, like the 'non-dairy milks' are anything but appetizing, the same with the soy cheese, etc.  But I did find one alternative that is both appetizing and reasonably priced: oat flour.  All you need is a giant canister of oatmeal and a blender/food processor/grinder and you've got oat flour.  I only grind as much as I need and keep any extra in the fridge.  So what can you do with oat flour?  Just about anything you can do with wheat flour, almost.

The first thing to remember with oat flour is you aren't going to have all that lovely gluten to hold your baked good together, to give them shape, chewiness, and texture.  I tried making a yeast bread with pure oat flour as I would a regular wheat loaf and ended up with rocks.  Oat flour is not as absorbent as wheat flour (at least in my opinion) so to get the same consistency as you'd expect with wheat flour, you use a whole lot more and end up with something rather inedible.  That was my first lesson.  Next I tried oat flour and yeast but treated it more as a quick bread with mixed success.  The stuff in the loaf pan rose beautifully but went flat during baking and took forever to bake.  The stuff in the muffin cups did better on both counts but wasn't all that different from a muffin.

So pure oat flour and yeast breads really aren't a good combination.  My next attempts were in recipes using baking soda, baking powder, or eggs as a leavening agent, if any.  I had pretty good success with pancakes, muffins, and yellow cupcakes, just following the recipe and substituting oat for wheat flour.  I also tried oat tortillas and a soufflé with pretty good success.  Today I tried chocolate chip cookies using a recipe I found online.  The results weren't bad, a bit crumbly but not unexpected considering the lack of gluten.  Overall, it is a nice substitute for wheat flour in non-yeast recipes, but it is less absorbent so your batters/doughs will be runnier than you might be used to but this seems to sort itself out during baking.