Nut flours

L. and I were having dinner the other night, and noticed that the salad dressing we were using was much lower-fat than we expected for what we thought was a peanut butter-based dressing. This turned out to be because it used roasted peanut flour instead of peanut butter.

Since then I've been intrigued by this ingredient and its fellows (apparently it's the remaining cake from producing expeller-pressed oils, so pretty much any nut that's pressed for oil can potentially be flour) I'm still thinking about what I'd like to do with these flours, should I find them reasonably-priced. Obviously I'll have to experiment a bit to determine properties and texture, but I'm inclined to try making, for example, peanut butter cookies using them might be very tasty. I'm thinking that they'll get in the way in anything that really requires gluten development, but a coating for chicken or fish would seem to be quite reasonable. The lack of gluten development could also be put to good use in applications where it's undesirable, like cakes or streusel.

I've turned up a couple food journal articles on the subject, but mostly it's food chemists suggesting the use of these flours to bump up protein content. As for recipes, I seem to be mostly striking out -- the top hits all seem to be those obnoxious recipe aggregator sites, the ones that serve up a ton of links to semi-relevent recipes and a ton of banner ads.

The other obstacle I'm finding is that things like hazelnut meal are being mislabeled as flour. They do look tasty, but that makes it a little harder to find the real thing (which appears to frequently be much cheaper, but less common)