ChufaNetherlands

Fresh Crumb Cake (from ohmypie.co.uk)

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Are you familiar with Marike Bol's website?

She makes many gluten-free recipes on her website ohmypie.co.uk.

Also recipes with chufa flour, this is the recipe for a fresh crumble cake:

A surprising cake that you conjure up without too much effort! I love this crumb cake. The chufa flour combines very well in this crispy surprising base covered with a fresh filling of red fruits or maybe apples. The choice is yours 😉

What do you need?

Springform 18 cm
Mixing bowl
Spatula
Pan
Garde

For the soil

  • 200 g oat flour - gluten-free
  • 100 g chufa flour - extra fine
  • 100 ml vegetable milk
  • 60 g sesame paste
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 30 g coconut oil

For the filling

  • 300 g fresh red fruit
  • 1 apple - peeled and chopped
  • Sweetener to taste and desire
  • 2 tbsp arrowroot

Optional: you can smear the bottom of the cake with a tablespoon of lemon curd. A little less healthy, but very tasty!

Getting started!

  1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line the bottom of a springform pan with baking paper. Grease the edges.
  2. Mix all ingredients together and knead by hand into a sticky dough. Spread 2/3 of the dough over the bottom of the cake, making sure there are about 2 centimetres of raised edges. Press the bottom down well. Slide the bottom into the oven for five minutes.
  3. Continue with the filling. Mash the fruit with a fork and stir in the arrowroot and sweetener with a whisk. Stir well so no lumps remain.
  4. Remove the base from the oven. Spread the tart base with lemon curd, if necessary. Pour the filling into the mould. Crumble the remaining dough over the filling. Now gently press the crumbs slightly into the filling with a flat hand. Slide the crumble cake into the centre of the oven for 40 minutes.
  5. Let the cake cool completely. Preferably a few hours to overnight in the fridge. After this, you can cut nice points from it.

Paleo Gluten-free Speculoos

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Should you want to make figures out of the speculoos, you can buy skins for them at shops like Dille&Kamille. We found it quite tricky ourselves despite using arrowroot to keep the dough from sticking to the wood.

Simply making a slice about half a cm high is a bit easier. Break into pieces after baking and you're done.

Ingredients:

120 grams Chufa flour Extra Fine
30 grams of arrowroot
40 g coconut blossom sugar
50 g cold butter or coconut oil
1.5 tsp specula spice
1 tsp baking soda
Pinch of salt
2 tbsp water or a milk of your choice

Put all the ingredients together and make a ball with your hands or a food processor. Leave in the fridge for at least an hour to let the dough become a bit firmer.

Bake on baking paper for 15 minutes at 170c.

Paleo Gluten-free Taai Taai

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Taai Taai is tough because of the honey. We had initially used 100 grams of honey but that was way too sweet.

We replaced half the honey with one egg white and then it was fine!

Ingredients:

40 g Chufa flour Extra Fine
20 grams of arrowroot
50 g almond flour
50 g honey
1 egg white, save yolk
1 tsp speculoos or biscuit spices
1 tsp ground anise (we finely ground whole anise in the Nutribullet)
1 tsp tartar powder / Cream of Tartar
pinch of salt
pinch of black pepper

Put everything in a mixing bowl and mix with a mixer to crumbly dough.

Leave to rest in the fridge for an hour or overnight.

From this quantity, make 4 slices 1 cm thick. Brush thinly with egg yolk and bake in the oven for 10 minutes at 200c.

Health starts in your gut

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Do a quick search on 'gut flora' in the news and you get headlines like:

NRC:

Beau Monde

Medical Contact

Max

Medical File

Dutch newspaper

Heart Foundation

Wow! It seems increasingly likely that gut flora is linked to various health conditions. Therefore, it seems logical to work towards the healthiest possible gut flora. Chufa can help with this with its dual fibre properties.

Impaired intestinal flora

According to the Stomach Liver Bowel Foundation disrupted intestinal flora is caused by:

  • An infection or disease
  • Use of some medicines including antibiotics
  • Some treatments such as radiotherapy or surgery
  • Stress
  • Prolonged unhealthy eating with little fibre

The daily recommended amount of fibre is 30 grams for women and 40 grams for men. Sometimes you read that primordial man may have eaten as much as 100 grams of fibre. This comes from an article by radiologist Stanley Boyd Eaton on what primordial man probably ate, see this abstract on Pubmed.

I read his original article from 1985 and in it, however, Eaton talks about 45.7 grams of fibre per day. Not a very big difference from today's recommended amount! The tricky thing is: most people don't get there and eat 15 - 23 grams of fibre today....

What can you do?

Drinking and sleeping enough and good hygiene will already help improve your gut flora. As for food, you can start adding more fibre yourself.

Two types of fibre

'Regular' fibre, unfermentable fibre is common knowledge and is found in fruit and vegetables and wholemeal products (which, however, also have drawbacks). They make for better bowel movements. Less well known are the fermentable fibres that also end up in your colon and serve there as food for your intestinal flora. This is also known as prebiotics.

Why do you want that?

When the bacteria in your colon feed on these fibres, they produce butyrates, butyric acid. These butyrates feed the cells of the intestines. They make the intestines stronger, allow the intestines to absorb more nutrients and maintain an optimal pH in the gut. Butyric acid also possesses anti-inflammatory properties.

How do you get this fibre?

There are more ways but they are also in the chufa!

The chufa is rich in the common fibre with its 11-16 grams of fibre / 100 grams. That the chufa also contains the fermentable fibre is shown in the following video, which looks at 'horchata', a drink known in Valencia (Spain) which is made from the chufa.

Chufa is an easy way to start improving your gut flora and thus your health right away! With a handful a day, you already increase your fibre intake by a few grams a day and feed your gut flora. The bacteria will thank you.