Oatmeal biscuits

My husbie, a bread addict, has been forced to follow a wheat-free diet. In this day of innumerable free-from fads, it should be quite easy to find all the necessary replacements for his medical-supervised diet. But, what people who follow these fads are unaware of is that a lot of these products are ultra-processed and as such a lot worse for our health than the things they replace. This is an extra problem for my very spoiled husbie because his diet excludes many of the additives more commonly used in the food industry. At our home we already ate mostly homemade food (with the exception of things like ham and cheese), but for a couple of months at least this is going to be a must.

God, do I go on and on! What I'm trying to say is that I had the idea of making oatcakes as a bread replacement, but that idea turned out to be a flop mainly because they are super fat. I then looked for recipes for wheat-free oatmeal biscuits and hit the big ridiculous fad wall. All the recipes I could find were as fat as oatcakes and many had, in addition, all these ridiculous ingredients I'd never be able to find in my local supermarket and (sorry for repeating myself) are probably a lot worse for your body than plain simple good wheat.

That is how I come to create my own recipe of oatmeal biscuits.

What these biscuits are:

• truly healthy, with a low-fat and low-sugar content (as compared to most biscuits) and no fancy ingredients.
• savoury or sweet: you choose.
• a bit crumbly, because unfortunately oatmeal does not provide the same binding as wheat flour.

What these biscuits aren't:

• the best, the most yummy, the most crunchy, the most chewy, and any other ridiculous superlatives. They're still super good, don't worry.
• the biscuits you want to bake, unless you have a very good reason to avoid wheat.

Nough talk, here is the recipe:

Ingredients

300g medium or fine oatmeal or, for extra crunchiness, 260g of oatmeal and 50gr of pinhead oats
2 tbsp of cornstarch (optional)
1 tsp baking powder (not sure about this, I'm still testing it)
2 tbsp of grounded linseeds (optional)
small pinch of salt
80g of sugar (optional)
1 tsp cinnamon (optional)
1/4 tsp nutmeg (optional)
60g of butter
2 eggs

As you can see most ingredients are optional. Add sugar if you want sweet biscuits, don't if you prefer them savoury. Then, add less or more salt accordingly. Linseeds, the only 'exotic' ingredient, were recommended by the doctor and you definitely can add more if you so wish or just skip them.

First, mix the dry ingredients. Then, add the butter. The butter can be melted before mixing with the dry ingredients, but I didn't do that. Instead I used a food processor to mix the cold butter with the dry ingredients, like I do for pie crust (which is probably the reason they're so crumbly, now that I think about it). Finally, mix the eggs. That simple! The dough should be pretty thick, but it will have a very different consistency to normal dough, mainly because oatmeal will not absorb the eggs as well as wheat flour.

If you have time (I never do), refrigerate the dough in the freezer for 20min.

Once that is done, you can start pre-heating the oven to 180C (350F).

This dough is not at all like biscuit dough that you can spread and cut. That's because, as I mentioned above, oatmeal will not absorb the eggs as well as wheat flour. On the other hand, it has none of the elasticty of wheatflour dough either, so it is much easier to spread. Use a normal tablespoon to scoop pieces of dough to a baking tray and then flatten them out. You can then use your hands to round them.

After that is done, transfer the biscuits to the oven. They take about 20 min to bake.