How to make dietetic biscuits that are also gluten-free?
The big problem of making gluten-free desserts is that often you have to buy many ingredients to get a natural product or choose preparations. At that point it is undoubtedly cheaper to buy good gluten-free cookies so as not to spend money on thickeners or ingredients that we would not know how to use in other recipes.

Another problem is calories . Often the ingredients to make gluten-free biscuits at home are for example almond flour (600 calories per 100 grams) or rapé coconut (660 calories) or peanut butter (we are always there, between 500 and 600 calories). Which makes the cookies so good, but definitely too fat and too caloric. I read dozens of diet recipes every day, and unfortunately when you count calories, you get as much as 150 for a cookie. Far too many.

This is because the use of fats binds dry ingredients that do not have gluten to compact, such as rice flour or Fioretto. Attention must also be paid to gluten-free flour mixes: almost always in the ingredients we find thickeners that are not tolerated by everyone in the intestine.

The trick of gluten-free, natural and nutritious flour

Here, on the other hand, we have a recipe for gluten-free diet biscuits that has few ingredients and low fat, and a very special flour that avoids any hassle since it compacts by itself. This is the masa harina , the nixtamalized corn flour that today can also be purchased on Amazon in Italy. With the same flour as well as these cookies you can make tortillas.

I make anything with it, even the pizza base, the cakes and the soft shortcrust pastry by mixing a part of masa harina with a part of whole greek yogurt and a pound of brown sugar. If you want you can also make cookies from this recipe!

Furthermore, masa is very nourishing: nixtamalisation, a pre-cooking with an alkaline agent, makes it possible to make the vitamin B3 contained in corn bioavailable. This is not the case with other types of corn flour and not even with sorghum and millet or teff. Let’s see the recipe.

DIET COOKIES RECIPE GLUTEN-FREE WITH HARINA MASA

For 20 biscuits

• 250 grams of masa harina (recommended brand is: Maseca, otherwise Naturelo. Do not change brands because unfortunately they are not the same thing)
• 150 grams of brown sugar + a spoon apart
• 180 ml of warm water (one glass)
• zest of a large grated lemon or orange
• 120 grams of fresh liquid cream type Granarolo (those who want can use soy cream but pay attention to the ingredients and must not be sweetened)
• half a sachet of San Martino vanilla (gluten-free)
• a pinch of salt
• a nice pinch of baking soda
• a pinch of cinnamon

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. In a bowl, mix the flour with the salt, baking soda, cinnamon, vanilla and lemon zest. Separately whip the liquid cream with the sugar and then add the water alternating it with the flour mixture in spoonfuls, until you get a homogeneous mixture. Make 20 balls with your hands.