After playing outside in the snow, a fire, hot cocoa, creamy tomato soup, and grilled cheese sandwiches were non-negotiable. The tiny loaf of gluten free bread I had bought for my daughter's lunches this week was gone within the first day. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I needed to come up with some sort of savory, sturdy bread-like product to please my family. I remembered making almond flour cheese biscuits a while back that turned out rather flat, and thought that the recipe could be adapted to make sandwich thins, you know--those round little sandwich breads favored by "healthy whole wheat" dieters. The only flours I had on hand were coconut, almond, and tapioca. I am not a fan of coconut flour in breads, so I worked with almond and tapioca. I've made Brazilian cheese bread, and tapioca flour pizza crusts before, so I knew cheese was pretty key to getting the elastic qualities I needed. Thankfully, there was half a wedge of Manchego forgotten at the back of the fridge. ::whew::
This was a kind-of "wing it" recipe, so you may need to tweak it.
Snow Day Sandwich Rounds
2 cups almond flour
1 cup tapioca flour/starch
1 tablespoon golden flaxseed meal (optional)
1 cup (not packed) coursely shredded cheese - I used manchego, but only because that's all we had left. Cheddar, parmesan, low moisture mozzarella would all work fine.
1 tsp. baking powder
4 eggs - I use farm eggs, if yours are rather large, 3 may be enough. I used 3 medium and 1 pullet.
1/2 cup+ milk of your choice - I used raw cow's milk, and did have to add a splash
Seasonings of your choice - I find for a savory bread, onion powder is key. I used roughly a 1/2 tsp. each of onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and a pinch of cayenne. Italian seasonings would work if you were making Italian style sandwiches.
Toppings - I put toasted sesame seeds on mine just for fun.
Preheat oven to 350. Dump dry ingredients and cheese in a bowl and sift with a whisk. Add eggs, it should turn into a stiff, gloopy dough. This is where you can tell if you need another egg--the flour should mostly be clumped up into the mix. Then add milk, I added 1/4c at a time until the consistency was thicker than pancake batter, but thinner than a drop biscuit. Plop by spoonfuls onto a baking sheet lined with parchment or a baking mat. Spread drops with the back of a spoon into a circle roughly the size of a sandwich round. They spread, but not much, so leave about an inch between rounds. Bake for 15-20 minutes, check to see if they look done, mine needed a few minutes under the broiler at this point, but my oven is weird.
Cool on a wire rack. Mine were too thin to slice, so we used two pieces for sandwiches. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing that if you had a muffin top style baking pan, you could make these thicker and slice them.
We used ours for sausage and egg "muffins".
Please forgive my photography (and lack thereof), I am currently stuck with a cell phone camera that doesn't even have a flash. Eventually I'd like to start taking step-by-step photos, but this will do for now.
