How to bake gut-friendly cookies

Get ready for 3 ingredient prebiotic cookies that feed the gut microbiome while satiating cravings for carbs.

Two years ago, I decided to write a cookbook for people with IBS and autoimmune disease. These are the people who are most confused about what to eat without upsetting their gut.

Many of the Vegan or Paleo (grain-free) recipes online masquerade as healthy, but have way too much sugar to be good for gut health. Too much sugar feeds bacteria and yeast and stresses the pancreas, liver and adrenals. But not enough carbs in the diet can stress the hormones and thyroid.

Stable blood sugar is a foundation of digestive and overall health. The key to my own IBS recovery, decades ago, was keeping my blood sugar stable for a whole year. This transformed my gut AND mental state.

People with digestive issues often move between binging on gluten, dairy, sugar or junk food or restricting themselves into a corner by avoiding starches and fruit.

There is a middle way!

My aim was to provide a middle ground solutions for people who struggle with what to eat.

That’s why Treats That Heal was born. I split the cookbooks into seasonal editions. Fall and winter recipes for comforting baked goods and a no cook spring and summer option for lighter

Eating a low-sugar diet has been my secret to maintaining my digestive health and staying gut symptom-free despite the stressful curveballs that life has thrown at me. This includes mold toxicity, moving a developing country, working too much, an infectious tick bite and moving to Europe during a global pandemic.

All in all, my gut has held up through all of this madness.

I am not perfect. I have moments of emotional eating. But since I bake my own low-sugar treats, it hasn’t done much damage. I simply “stress bake” gut-friendly treats.

Meet chickpea flour

While the recipes in my book are 100 percent Paleo, my my latest culinary crush is not. It’s chickpea flour.

Not everyone can tolerate legumes, but when my food sensitivity test showed I was intolerant to almonds, I had to find something just as healthy to replace it. I also avoided eggs for more than 6 months due to a sensitivity. So I started baking vegan recipes.

Chickpeas are not Paleo because beans contain lectins, which can be hard on the intestinal lining. But this is not true for everyone. If you can tolerate chickpeas there is a LOT of benefit in eating them.

The main one is that they contain prebiotic fiber called resistant starch, which feeds anti inflammatory bacteria in the large intestine. You can learn more about prebiotics and good sources of them here.

Fewer ingredient treats are easier to digest

Recipes that contain only a handful of ingredients are easy to whip up and to digest.

My favorite comfort foods lately have been my 3 ingredient waffles (recipe in Treats that Heal winter edition) and these 3 ingredient cookies.

Quantity is everything

As a digestive health coach, I know that quantity matters. Consuming too many of these cookies can cause bloat and pain for people with bacterial or fungal overgrowth while one cookie may be well tolerated.

That’s because anything that your body can’t digest and absorb becomes food for bad or over growing gut microbes.

Eating the cookie alone as a snack will also make it easier to digest than eating it with a meal.

A sustainable way to heal the gut is make your own treats, instead of eating processed, gluten-free store bought treats. A rule of thumb is to keep added sugar at 1 to 2 tablespoons per recipe.

Restriction can backfire as it leads to binging on the wrong things. Bake a lot and freeze the extras to you always have healthy snacks on hand.

I hope you love these cookies as much as I do.

3 ingredient chickpea cookies

Note: If you can’t tolerate chickpeas, you can sub it for almond flour, milled pumpkin seeds, sweet potato flour or tigernut flour.

Ingredients

1 cup of chickpea flour

1 to 2 tablespoons of honey or maple syrup (use 1 tablespoon if adding white chocolate chips)

1/2 cup of nut or seed flour (can use tigernut butter or coconut butter)

1/3 cup of non dairy milk

Optional: 1/4 to 1/2 cup of chocolate chips or white chocolate chips or chopped nuts

Optional: 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon or cardamom

Optional: 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda for fluffier cookies

How to

Preheat oven to 350 F or 180 C

Put chickpea flour in a bowl and break up al the lumps with a fork or your fingers

Mix in nut or seed butter of choice

Add sweetener and mix batter with a fork

Add milk and keep mixing.

If the batter is to dry and thick add more milk, 1 tablespoon at a time until you have a thinner consistency. If you are not sure if the battery is at a good consistency, bake one cookie as a sample to see if it needs more moisture or sweetener.

Add optional chips or spices and mix again.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or grease it with coconut oil or oil of choice.

Spoon a tablespoons of cookie dough onto the cookie sheet. Space them evenly apart.

This recipe made about 15 cookies for me.

Flatten the cookie dough with the back of a spoon and bake in a preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes. Take out when the edges start to brown a lot.

Remove and let cool.

These will keep in an airtight container the fridge for up to 4 days or on the counter for 2 days.