Oat Cakes
A lot of you are still looking for GF recipes, and although I think y’all probably believed I was lying when I said I’m working on it, I really wasn’t lying. I am, however, not particularly good at GF baking, so these recipes are taking me a lot of time and failures (no dog to eat them!) to develop such that I believe they’re good and reliable.
At long last, I finally cracked the oat cake code! Turned out I was really overcomplicating things: shock of shocks! Admittedly, I got mad at this starter and froze it so I wouldn’t have to think about it for a while and instead could let it sit in the back of my mind until new ideas presented. I served these with butter, maple syrup, and jam (so everyone could pick and choose), cold ham, and roasted cabbage and onions. Child Tester prefers her cabbage raw or fermented, so I gave her raw cabbage.
This is enough to make 4 cakes. As per usual, please feel free to scale it up or down along the ratio so you’ve got as much as you need!
Here’s what you’ll need
1 cup oat starter
1 cup rolled oats (I used old fashioned, because that’s what I have. You can use the quick or 1-3 minute ones, or whatever else; I haven’t yet tried this with steel cut, but when I do I’ll probably soak those before adding them in)
1/2 cup oat flour
1 teaspoon each: salt, sugar (can use honey in place of the sugar, if desired)
1/4 cup water
bit of oil for the pan (optional)
Here’s what you’ll do
Mix together all the dry ingredients, then add in your starter and mix it well. I used a spatula for all of this, because I just wasn’t feeling hands today. Cover and let it rest and “rise” for up to 4 hours (spoiler alert: it’s too dense to rise!). I left mine for 4 hours, but you technically don’t need to let it rise if you don’t feel like it or otherwise you don’t have time. Your call entirely!
When you come back to it, you’re going to find that your oats decided to oat and soaked up all the water from the starter. All of it. It’ll probably be kind of crumbly. As is probably obvious by now, I thought I had taken pictures of these steps, but NOPE! Anyway, it is not going to be what you want it to be. Here is where you add that water in. If you do it before you’re ready to shape, you should expect to have to do it again.
Heat a skillet over medium heat, then split the dough into fourths. Cold water on your hands will help you form your cakes without it sticking all over your hands. Once it’s portioned out, you’ll want to shape it into flat rounds or ovals. Do not shape this like regular bread! Try to make these as thin as possible to shorten the cooking time. You can oil, or not, your skillet. I chose yes here, because I have a tendency to become easily distracted and I wanted to make sure these weren’t going to stick if CT needed help with school stuff or … well, squirrel!
I feel like this still is a far more accurate representation of what my days look like than I generally am willing to acknowledge as such. But here we are anyway!
Doesn’t look too tasty at this point, but you can clearly see the water addition to the dough.
You may/will need to flip these over several times. I have an electric stove, so I also needed to move my breads around the pan due to lack of even heating.
Also forgot to take a picture of these being flattened out a lot more. I used a spatula to do that while they were cooking, because I didn’t want to sit and wait for them to cook when they were thicker.
Once you can smell or see (because you peeked, yay!) that the bottom is pretty much done (maybe even with some alluring, slightly burnt spots?), flip those bad boys over and give them another few minutes. Let your bread cool, or not, and then nom out!
