Flour – separating almond flour from almond meal

Wheat Flours at Cook's Thesaurus discusses varieties of wheat flours and their substitutions in general baking, yeast breads, and as breading agents.

And here's a reference discussing "the carbohydrate-content, dietary fiber content and 'net carbs' in all types of flour": Carbohydrates in Flour and Baking Foods.

I consult these pages as jumping off points when I'm altering my baking recipes. I'm a big fan of mixing flours to come up with lower-carbohydrate and more nutritionally sound baked goods (white flour isn't the most nutritional option out there, no matter that it's one of the most common options in baking). Oat, spelt, and soy flours figure in a lot of my recipes (note that using soy flour calls reducing the baking temperature called for in a recipe by 25°F, and that soy has a very pronounced flavor that not everyone likes).

The more you learn about the various flour options, the easier it is to make substitutions with confidence, so I encourage you to do a bit of reading. Of course, if you're rushed, baking sites (ones that sell high-quality flour, such as Bob's Red Mill) tend to tell you right on the page how much of their flour to substitute for wheat flour.

As a general rule, the more whole grain flours you use the better because of their higher fiber contents. If you subtract the fiber from the carbohydrate count, you find the net carbohydrate of the flour in question, and it's the net carbohydrate that tells you how your sugar levels will be affected. One carbohydrate serving is 15 grams of carbohydrate total.

One cup of all-purpose flour has 95 grams of carbohydrate and 3 grams of dietary fiber, which gives each cup a net carbohydrate amount of 92 grams (which is 6.13 carb. servings). One cup of whole wheat flour, on the other hand, has 87 grams of carbohydrate and 15 grams of dietary fiber, which gives each cup a net carbohydrate amount of 72 grams (which is 4.8 carb. servings). Even if you're baking a bread that isn't particularly low in carbohydrate, getting the benefit of the increased nutrition and fiber from a whole grain flour will benefit you.

It is no wonder you can't keep them whole. There isn't anything in the recipe to give them integrity.

A normal pancake has lots of egg and lots of flour. When you are frying them, the proteins of the egg uncurl and connect to their neighbours to set in a loose, weak mesh. You know how the egg white sets when you fry an egg without whisking it? That happens in a pancake batter too, but much weaker, because there is a load of other stuff swimming around, so the protein molecules have less neighbours to build their connections to.

Then there is the flour. As usual, when you heat a batter, the gluten proteins in flour do the same thing as the egg white proteins, building their own mesh which permeates the whole pancake. While there is less gluten building than in a well-kneaded dough, it is enough to make the pancake hold together.

In your recipe, this just doesn't happen. You have no gluten content at all. So the stronger holding-together-part falls away. Unlike wheat flour, almond flour has no gluten. So it isn't contributing to holding the pancake together.

So what about the whole other protein you have in there? Well, the point is, it is already set. Ricotta, whey protein are both cooked proteins. They can't uncurl and connect a second time. So instead of helping the binding, they are inhibiting it. Every egg protein molecule which could have connected to a neighbouring egg protein molecule in a more fluid batter now keeps bumping into almond, ricotta and whey particles, to which it can't bind at all. So what you have here is a mixture of wetted powders without a binding agent. No wonder it can't hold together.

The best way I can see here is adding wheat flour back. You don't have to sacrifice all of your almond flour. Make a partial substitution, and also substitute part of the whey protein. This will keep the proper viscosity of the batter, while preserving the almond flour taste.

The way the recipe is constructed, however, it looks like somebody decided to exterminate all the carbs in it just because. If you are determined to keep your pancakes zero carbs, you can try throwing out all the whey powder and adding egg white instead. I can't guarantee this will be enough to do the binding, but if you insist on "real pancakes", this is worth a try.

I don't think there are any other traditional techniques you can use to improve your "batter" bonding. Of course, nowadays you can experiment with additives. Transglutaminase looks like your best bet. You'll probably need lots of tries until you get the recipe right, but it should bind the cooked ricotta proteins well enough. You don't want a superstrong binding for this application.