Hi! I've been using some great recipes that call for garbanzo flour. Since it isn't available locally and garbanzos are, I've been trying my hand at making flour. Not much success . I've tried a food processor and a blender, and both seem to take forever to grind. Plus, I wore out my food processor!

The local mill says they'll grind it if I dry them in the oven for a few hours.

I looked on line for a mill that can do it, but most specify not to grind things like beans with soft centers.

Ideas, anyone?

Thanks!

Well, there are mills that can do it, but they are expensive. Not to be discouraging, but I had looked into grinding my own flours, and unless I buy huge quantities of beans or grains, it turned out to be cheaper to buy the flour.

Here is a link to how to grind beans, and some grinders which can be used:
http://waltonfeed.com/grain/passport/beans.html#grind

I buy bean flours here:
www.barryfarm.com

HTH

There's a reason the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas used things like corn for tortillas and beans to put on or next to the tortillas....
or the Europeans, growing peas and barley, made bread out of the barley and soup out of the peas...


That being said, you might want to just mail order the garbanzo bean flour from somewhere if you can't find it in stores. We have a large Indian Sikh population in northern California so the stuff is all over the place. (this is one reason I love diversity because it makes grocery shopping so much easier.... a lot of the ethnic cooking requires the base ingredients, not "Dinner In A Box.")

The alternative would be to just take cooked beans, or canned beans, drain off the liquid, rinse, and mash up well and used the mashed beans in the dough/batter as an ingredient. Rinsing the cooked beans gets rid of a lot of the starch that people have trouble digesting, the missing liquid can then be replaced with more water or vegetable juice or broth if desired. If you wanted to cook beans from scratch, lentils would be the fastest cooking ones to use.

The problem with grinding a lot of bean flour at once is that once ground, you have to store it in the refrigerator or freezer or it tends to go rancid quickly.

Also be aware that raw bean flour will be highly indigestible by most people when used in simple baking since it just doesn't "cook" enough in a baking situation. Beans need long soaking, preferrably with an acid of some kind and then long cooking to become digestible. I've used the canned bean idea given above with OK results. You just have to carefully adjust all the liquid in your recipe. I believe that most companies who professionally produce bean flours, process them in some way to eliminate the indigestible enzyme inhibitors, either by presoaking the beans or some kind of special enzyme action. I tried using my own raw ground bean flour and found it to be very unacceptable compared to the boughten kind.

Thanks, everyone. My hubby has a terrible time with digestion, so maybe bean flours just aren't for him:). I haven't found any locally, though I get rice, tapioca, and potato starch for incredibly low prices! So, I think maybe I'll just stay away from the beans for a while.

Sure appreciate the expertise here!

Cynth

Interestingly, I find bean flours to be more agreeable to my digestive system. I think it's because they are relatively high in protein and fiber, and low in carbs compared to grain flours. So I guess if you know what sorts of stuff is the more digestible for him, then you could use flours which cater to that.