Pancakes are generally one of the worst breakfast foods you can eat… but the recipe below, from MindBodyGreen, is an exception, if you choose to eat breakfast. Made with coconut flour and almond meal, these pancakes are entirely grain-free.
Even better, they contain healthy ingredients like eggs, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter, which means you can indulge without feeling guilty. You can make these pancakes ahead of time and eat them as a snack, too, just be careful with the maple syrup. Either skip it or use just a light drizzle for flavor.
Coconut Flour Almond Meal Pancakes
Makes about 16 small pancakes
Ingredients
- ½ cup coconut flour
- 1/3 cup almond meal
- 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
- 4 organic, pastured eggs
- 1 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
- 1/3 cup milk (raw cow’s or coconut)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- a pinch of sea salt
- 1-2 tablespoons organic, raw grass-fed butter + more for serving
- pure maple syrup to drizzle (optional)
Directions
- In a large bow, mix all the dry ingredients: the coconut flour, almond meal, baking powder, and salt.
- Slowly whisk in the wet ingredients: the eggs, coconut oil, milk, and vanilla. Mix until the batter is smooth. (If it feels a little dry, add more milk until it reaches the consistency you’re after).
- Heat a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the butter and allow it to melt, then add scoops of batter (about a ¼ cup each) for silver dollar pancakes. Cook for about a minute on each side until golden brown. Slather with butter and drizzle maple syrup as desired.
New to Coconut Flour? Why It’s a Healthy Alternative
For starters, coconut flour is 14 percent coconut oil. Around 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, which your body converts into monolaurin, a monoglyceride that can actually destroy lipid-coated viruses such as HIV and herpes, influenza, measles, gram-negative bacteria, and protozoa such as giardia lamblia.
Coconut oil is also comprised of medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) that are easily digested and readily cross cell membranes. MCFAs are immediately converted by your liver into energy rather than being stored as fat. This is in part why I recommend coconut oil as an ideal replacement for non-vegetable carbohydrates.
Coconut flour also contains a whopping 58 percent dietary fiber, which is the highest of any flour. For comparison, wheat bran is only 27 percent fiber. Coconut flour is very low in digestible carbohydrates—even lower than some vegetables.
Coconut flour has no gluten either, which is a very good thing. Unfortunately, many people, physicians included, still believe that if you don’t have celiac disease, gluten is fair game and you can eat as much of it as you like.
In reality, gluten sensitivity may actually affect as much as 30 to 40 percent of all people, and according to Dr. Alessio Fasano at Massachusetts General Hospital, virtually all of us are affected to some degree.
This is because we all create something called zonulin in the intestine in response to gluten. This protein, found in wheat, barley, and rye, makes your gut more permeable, which allows proteins to get into your bloodstream that would otherwise have been excluded.
That then sensitizes your immune system and promotes inflammation and autoimmunity. Once gluten sensitizes your gut, it then becomes more permeable and all manner of previously excluded proteins—including casein and other dairy proteins—have direct access to your bloodstream, thereby challenging your immune system.
According to Dr. David Perlmutter, much of our current disease burden stems from the fact that we are contaminating our immune systems with proteins to which the human immune system has never, in the history of humankind, been previously exposed to. So a gluten-free flour like coconut flour is an ideal replacement for wheat flour.
