Minimising one's intake of carbohydrates tends to deprive one of some rather lovely culinary items such as pasta and bread, because grains contain a lot of carbohydrates thanks to the high amount of starch in them. Typical substitutes are non-grain flours such as almond flour or coconut flour, but those come with their own problems – a distinctive taste (especially for coconut), a crumbly texture and they're around 20 times as expensive.
Since I can happily eat gluten and gluten is not just apparently the key to the typical texture of wheat-based dough products but also a protein with rather low carb content, I decided to try and make a flour substitute mix that I can use more or less like wheat flour with the help of vital gluten. However, I am unsure about just using pure gluten as a flour substitute – partially because there's a lot of claims about its inflammatory properties even for non-coeliac/intolerant people and partially because I sort of just assume there's a reason nobody seems to be doing it.
Because of that I wanted to ask whether there was an easily available, halfway affordable and low-carb (let's say under 8%) edible substance that I can use as a bulk base for my flour substitute which doesn't have weird reactions when used in baking or noodle making and isn't too far off in terms of taste (as a scale: I can tolerate almond flour, but coconut flour is too much for me outside of cake). I'm considering adding some psyllium husk to jack up the fibre content, but I don't think it's suited for this purpose. Advice as to the ratio for mixing is also appreciated.
Best Answer
Konjac flour, which consists mainly glucomannan gum, is a natural low-carb bulking ingredient. I have never used it in baking, but I ate noodles made of it. It does have its taste though, so you should probably try eating some shirataki noodles before ordering and baking with this flour to know if you can tolerate the taste.