Hi all,


My daughter needs to be on a high fibre diet and I was told I could use wholemeal flour (when baking).

Now, can I just replace the plain flour with wholemeal and do I use baking powder with it?

Its all new to me so any help/advice is much appreciated.


Zeetra xx

Personally I'd probably look at other fibre rich foods rather than mess with substituting wholemeal for white flour in baking. I don't have any personal experience with the baking, but back in the 70's when I was a young child, my mother was on a big health kick and baked everything with wholemeal flour instead of white. Nothing rose, textures were odd.. I don't think it is just that easy to do a 1:1 swap. I could be very wrong though - I'm sure someone else will be able to give you better advice.

Does everything she eats need to be high in fibre or just hit a cergain number of grams per day? Tamarillos are one of my fav high fibre foods, and I also have a great recipe for muffins made with All Bran. A 40g serving of All Bran has something insane like 14g of fibre.

In my pre gluten free days I would use half wholemeal half white flour. I would look at otherways of getting adequate fibre. I sometimes wonder whether the fact I had a lot of wholemeal flour in my diet for years contributed to everyone in my family being either celiac or gluten sensitive!

We have spoken to the dietician today. She has suggested I use this when baking as I cant control her eating at school and she gets the right foods in her lunch box, but Im now baking instead of buying biscuits, muffins etc.. I just want to make it that little bit extra healthier for her as well as the rest of us.

Try baking with wholegrains like quinoa or millet too to increase fibre, and adding bran like suggested above. Completely subsituting wholemeal flour for all purpose doesn't work very well for things that need to rise, like muffins, but you can partially substitute it pretty well. In general though I think the best way would be to increase wholegrains, legumes and fruits and veges.

With some recipes I use 50/50 white and wholemeal flour. Things like muffins and carrot cakes and banana cakes seem to work out fine.

There are lots of good breakfast options that are high fibre and yummy. I find prunes and kiwifruit to be two good foods that are high in fibre and delicious. I don't use them in cooking really but I do have them as a snack or with lunch.

I've had a yummy date wholemeal slice that would be high fibre but I don't have the recipe sorry.

Zeetra I made a banana cake yesterday and used 100% wholemeal flour, and brown sugar instead of white. It turned out much much nicer than the previous one I made with the same recipe. In fact after the previous time I was going to search out a new banana cake recipe but in the rush of preparing the cake I resorted to the familiar. I will now make it with this adaption.

It is a taste recipe

[recipefinder.msn.co.nz]

Melt and Mix Banana Cake is the name.

It is slightly denser and a slightly rougher texture but with a lemon icing (removing the healthy aspect which I had created until now) it is delicious.

I have a favourite blueberry muffin recipe which has 2 cups flour in it. I have always replaced the flour with 1 1/2 cups flour and 1 cup bran, all other ingredients stay the same. I prefer the end product to the original which I felt was too "cakey" for a muffin.

We made the change gradually, replacing just a little of the white flour with wholemeal initially & increasing the amount as we got used to the taste. Different proportions seem to work best for different items. We also found we far prefer stoneground wholemeal flour - 'ordinary' supermarket wholemeal flour comes nowhere near it!