Of all the recipes made with nut flours these days, many are a poor shadow of the wheat flour recipes they mean to replace. Not this! Pecan sandies are all about nuts in the first place, and this crunchy salty-sweet cookie is a natural and delicious sugar-free, gluten-free treat.
Replacing flour is a tough game! I’ve been on a low-carb and gluten-free diet since 2015, and have tried countless recipes which try to imitate the texture of flour and gluten using nut and coconut flours, along with rice flours and other substitutes. While I admire these attempts, most of these recipes simply remind me what I’m missing, highlighting with each bite the gap between these imitations and the real thing! Meanwhile, the few gluten-free innovations which really do impress on taste and texture (Mod Pizza’s cauliflower crust I’m talking to you) do so with so many carbs (87 grams!) that they can’t be a regular part of my diet.
So my advice is to stop trying to recreate all-purpose flour centric recipes, and instead bake something naturally suited to these ingredients. With the browned butter flavors and the light shortbread-style crunch you truly won’t feel like you’re missing out at all, compared to the real deal. All this recipe takes is a little planning to allow time for the nuts to roast and cool, for browned butter to cool, and for the finished cookies to cool at the end. Good things come to low-carb bakers who wait!
Besides the browned butter, the other secret ingredient is PureCane TM sweetener, a natural sugar-free sweetener which tastes remarkably identical to white and brown sugar, made from fermented sugar cane.
I’ve worked to perfect this recipe over the last year along with my family, and would love to hear your feedback, both from the low-carb and gluten-free crowd, and anyone else as well.