Last night my friend Donald and I went to the Whaligoe Steps Café for an oatcake class with the café’s chef and co-owner, Karen. I guess enough of us raved about her oatcakes and asked for the recipe that she decided to share her secrets with us. Plus she’s always trying to come up with inventive new themed evenings and events for her patrons.
I’ve also added oats back into my diet over the last couple of months, and without getting into gastrointestinal details, I’ll just say that I’m convinced they do me good. So being able to make tasty oatcakes like Karen’s instead of buying the blah store-bought ones was an appealing prospect””particularly when they’re made of something that’s so cheap it’s practically free.
So here I’m going to shake my head and try to empty out what I remember, half so I won’t forget, half in case you’d like to try making them, and half because I haven’t blogged in a long time. *(Yes, my blog is a corner of the universe where it’s possible to have three halves.)
Ingredients & instructions
100 grams of oats, in the following proportion:
- 50% medium oats
- 20% jumbo oats
- 20% pinhead oats
- 10% finely milled oats (this acts as one kind of binder)
To this, add about 10 grams of brown rice flour to act as a binder (corn flour also works). I’m not keen on eating too much starch, but my experiments in low-carb cooking have proven to me that anything cracker-y or bread-y without a ‘real’ binder tends to turn into a mess that falls apart.
We experimented with adding all sorts of different dry seasonings, spices, and seeds””fennel, chilli flakes, sesame seeds, Maldon salt, black pepper, orange zest””and just about everything worked! (Black pepper was my favourite.)
Mix this up with your hands, then stir in one tablespoon of olive oil (optional, but it adds a better “mouth feel”, Karen said), and finally add a small splash of hot water. Now mix it all again.
It’s important that the mix clumps together but is not wet: if it’s wet, it’ll have to bake for longer, which changes the consistency and makes it more likely to burn.
Roll this out as flat and thin as you can between two sheets of baking paper (the silicone kind, not parchment, which will stick, apparently), then peel the top layer off. If the paper left heavy wrinkles in the surface, the oatcakes will be a bit ugly, so you can put the parchment back on and flatten them out. Then remove the parchment again for baking.
Why not cut out cookie-cutter circles like the oatcakes you get in stores? Because, Karen said, that means you end up working with about 1/3 of the dough while the rest gets put aside to set into a “glumpy” mass that’s much more difficult to roll and might as well be thrown out. Instead, Karen’s oatcakes are big, primitive looking sheets of crispy deliciousness that look like something Romans would eat.
And you know what? Karen informed us that Romans did eat oatcakes: They carried around oats, added some of the salt they got with their pay, and cooked up cakes on their shields! So much for oatcakes being a Caithness speciality.
Now put your rolled-out oatcake into the oven at 170°C for 12 minutes.
Partway through, though, take the oatcake out and flip it over, peeling off the parchment, and put it back into the oven so they other side can dry out evenly.
P.S. What about the bookbinding class I taught, or the relay race Craig and I ran, or having my Scottish family all visit at once? Well, that all happened, but I’m still a bit tired (though each of these was fun) and haven’t anything particularly enlightening to say. So instead you get a recipe.