keto stromboli

Ugh. The keto-stromboli experiment was a failure. Not that keto stromboli have never existed until now, but rather that my personal experiment—which involved trying to create my own mix of keto flours to create my own keto dough—was a failure. I should've just gone with a Joe Duff-style fathead dough (mozzarella cheese, cream cheese, and almond flour), or I could've pan-fried some mozz to use as a no-carb wrap, of sorts, for my stromboli filling.

The mix of ingredients turned out to be off. I started off with 135 g of almond flour, then 70 g each of flaxseed meal and oat-fiber powder. I added 45 g of vital wheat gluten, 10 g of yeast, some salt, some garlic powder, some inulin (for the yeast to eat), some Everything Bagel seasoning, some dried oregano, and some dried basil. I added warm water and olive oil to the mix and churned everything for a couple minutes in my stand mixer. Nothing came together, so I added two more tablespoons of vital wheat gluten for the dough's gluten structure, plus another whole cup of warm water and maybe a sixth of a cup of olive oil. That improved the dough's texture greatly, and the smell coming off the raw dough was lovely—very Italian-ish.

I then had to measure the dough out into 250 g portions; I rolled out each portion between two sheets of parchment paper, added the stromboli filling (sauce, mozz, salsiccia, sliced dry-cure sausage, mushrooms, and a shredded-Parmigiano/mozzarella combination on top), folded everything over, then baked it all.

The result was terrible—the dough had lost its lovely smell by the time the baking was done, and while the fillings were okay, the dough's taste was bitter. I could have mitigated that through the use of more sweetener. If I ever try this again, though, I think I might avoid nastier flours and flour substitutes like oat fiber and flaxseed meal in favor of safer-tasting flour subs like almond flour and coconut flour (which, like flaxseed meal, absorbs a ton of water). Or I'll stick with established keto-flour recipes made by the pro-level experimenters, e.g., Victoria's Keto Flour.

All the same, I ate both stromboli because I'm not gonna waste even my failures. I thought of it as punishment for my lack of success.

Here are some pics:

I could've rolled the dough thinner and done the spiral thing that a lot of people like to do with stromboli (see here, for example), but that wouldn't have improved the taste. The bitterness of the flaxseed and oat fiber dominated everything. I've made other breads using these flour subs before, but in those recipes, there was also a lot of sweetener to compensate for the bitterness.

The search for decent dough goes on.