Baking with Millet Flour | King Arthur Flour

Baking with ancient grains: Millet Flour — baking with ancient grains:

Millet Flour

Millet flour is packed with nutrition for flavorful, healthier baked goods. Naturally gluten-free, it adds mild flavor to both sweet and savory recipes. You might recognize whole millet: some cuisines use the small yellow seed in cooking, and it's typical in many bird seed mixtures, as well.

Flavor: Sweet and corn-like.
Texture effect: Cornbread-like in small amounts; sandy in larger quantities.
Works best in: Muffins and quick breads.
Gluten free: Yes.

Try millet flour in your kitchen.

How to incorporate millet flour into your baking

As with many ancient grains, millet flour is versatile enough to use in many standard recipes. To find the best combinations, our test kitchen bakers took five of our most popular recipes and replaced a portion of the all-purpose flour with millet flour. The results were delicious. Some recipes came alive with a half-and-half substitution: 50% millet, 50% all-purpose flour. Others worked best with 25% millet flour. Here are our full findings for pancakes, scones, cinnamon bread, banana bread, and muffins. Learn more about the testing process on our blog

Millet in Pancakes

Pancakes made with 50% millet flour are light and fluffy, with sweet, corn-like flavor. A 100% millet batter is rather difficult to work with, so while we like the flavor of the finished pancakes, their texture is quite dense.

We also liked: Spelt

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Millet in Scones

With perfectly tender texture and sweet flavor, our favorite millet scones are those made with 25% millet flour. We find a 25% dough is easier to work with than the wetter doughs made using 100% or even 50% millet flour. These higher-substitution scones are also dry and dense.

We also liked: Kamut

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Millet in Cinnamon Bread

Cinnamon bread made with 25% millet flour is light and fluffy, just like our favorite all-purpose yeast loaf, with added sweetness from the millet. A loaf made with 50% millet flour doesn't rise quite as high, but is almost as soft and moist. Tip: Mix in water gradually; millet tends to absorb less.

We also liked: Kamut or Spelt

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Millet in Banana Bread

If you're not concerned with appearance, banana bread made with 50% millet flour is perfectly moist and tender, with bright banana flavor. Looks-wise, a 25% millet flour loaf is more attractive. At 100% and 50% millet flour, loaves collapse and are quite dense in the center.

We also liked: Barley

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Millet in Muffins

Substituting 50% millet flour creates muffins with light, tender texture and mild, sweet, corn-like flavor. Millet muffins are very much like cornbread, in fact, even replicating its slight crumbliness. Using 100% millet flour yields extra-crumbly, extra-flat-topped muffins.

We also liked: Spelt

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