Reader Query: Use Ground Oatmeal or Milled Oat Flour?

Lisa emailed me with a few questions about the ground oatmeal in my Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies:

Hi and thanks for a great site! Your recipes call for ground oatmeal. So I want to know if oat flour can be used in your cookies? I understand that oat flour has no gluten & that recipes won't rise because of that. OR is the ground oatmeal totally recommended by you? Also, if I ground the oatmeal in a blender then how do I know I have the correct ratio called for in your Chocolate Chip Oatmeal cookies (and other cookie recipes you have)? Thanks so much & I can't wait to make your cookies!

Hi there, Lisa! You should grind then measure. If you have extra ground oatmeal, you can freeze it in a Zip Loc bag and save it for another batch of cookies. (Hooray!) But, to prevent grinding more oatmeal--or any other "grindable"--than I need, I tend to process the equivalent of only a few handfuls at a time. I then measure what I have and grind more if I need it.

I haven't used milled oat flour before in any of my recipes, but my guess is that it's as fine and powdery as regular white flour. Because people are more likely to have oatmeal on hand than oat flour, I'd suggest grinding the oatmeal in-house as I've described. The oatmeal you grind yourself will not be as fine as oat flour, so it will yield a cookie with a really nice texture. In addition, you won't need to tweak the measurements in my recipes to account for the finer grain of the oat flour.

I hope this helps. Happy baking!

Comments

[B]

I've used both in the Oatmeal Snickerdoodle recipe (one of my favorite cookies EVER!). I got the oat flour from the bulk bins at Whole Foods and used it the first time I made them. The end result is just as delicious and slightly less... gritty? maybe? No matter how long I grind my oatmeal I can't get it as fine as the oat flour. However, I've made them half a dozen times since then with ground oatmeal and I have zero complaints about them. They still disappear just as quickly as they did the first time!

[Oatmeal Cookie Guy]

Thanks for writing in, B. Wow. That's some high praise for my Oatmeal Snickerdoodles. Thank you so much! And thanks also for adding to the conversation. So there you have it, everyone: Ground oatmeal and milled oat flour are perfectly interchangeable. Feel free to use whichever you have on hand.

[Pandora For Sale Australia]

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