Vegan Gingerbread Made With Rye and Corn Flours, and Soy Protein Isolate

I developed a recipe for a completely vegan loaf cake that has quite high protein content. When this gingerbread is taken out of the oven, 100 grams of it should have 219 kcal and 12 g of protein. Making of this cake, while quite simple in principle, as it only requires mixing of some powders with water and baking resulting dough, is actually quite unusual, because large amount of water is required and gingerbread must spend large amount of time in hot oven. If this loaf cake is to become staple of a vegan diet, then care must be taken to supplement the diet with vitamin B12 and other essential nutrients. While I’m actually still only a vegetarian (it is a result of living in backward and anti-scientific European Union), I believe that we should all become vegans, as it is most promising way of reducing resource use and carbon emissions of agriculture. Carbon footprint of plant-based proteins is few times lower than animal-based proteins (source).

Ingredients:

• 500 g of wholemeal rye flour (type 2000)
• 300 g of corn flour (cheap kind used by me most likely was not nixtamalized)
• 200 g of soy protein isolate
• 250 g of granulated sugar
• 10 g of salt
• 15 g of baking soda
• 20 g of cocoa powder
• 20 g of store-bought gingerbread spice mix that was 25% cinnamon, 6.2% ginger, and also contained cloves, nutmeg, coriander, cardamom, black pepper, allspice and brown sugar (amount of the spices was quite conservative; you can add individual spices instead of premade mix, like I did in my previous Instructable)
• around 1440 g of water

Tools:

• parchment baking paper
• large bowl
• knife
• fork
• small plate for holding knife and fork
• scissors
• kitchen scale
• oven with a rack or a tray
• sink, faucet, washing up liquid and some paper towels / rags for cleaning up after yourself

Ingredients used in this recipe contain gluten and potentially other substances that may be harmful for a portion of human population. You bake it and eat it at your own risk.

Put bowl on scale and start pouring powders inside, while measuring their mass. At first I suggest that you pour portion of rye and corn flours, then remaining ingredients, and finally rest of the flours, so that better mixing is achieved. During pouring, when you are close to the desired mass, pour very slow and gently, because otherwise you may put too much of an ingredient.

When all dry ingredients are inside the bowl, mix them all thoroughly with a blunt end knife (or other utensil that you have at hand). Note that during stirring I take bowl from the scale, so that I won’t break anything.

Start pouring water to the bowl and mixing it with appropriate utensil (knife in my case). My preferred method of mixing is holding the bowl at 45° angle with one hand and mixing lower portion of the bowl’s contents with the other one, making small rotary movements with the wrist. From time to time bowl itself is rotated in small increments, so all the contents can be mixed. When your knife gets sticky with dough, you can clean it with other utensil (for example a fork). I needed to add almost 1.5 liters of water to achieve right consistency of dough.

I haven’t tried this, but kneading of the dough should also be possible. Less water will be used then and baking process itself will require less time.

Set your oven to 200°C. Fan was turned off when I baked this batch of gingerbread. Your oven may be different from mine and other settings may work better (or worse).

While you wait for the oven to heat up, you may perform Step 5.

Place a rack or a tray on a flat surface next to a bowl. Cover top of it with baking paper. Pour dough on the baking paper, pushing dough with knife will help to overcome viscosity. If some dry powder remains at the bottom, add small amount of water and stir contents of the bowl. You should be able to form two loafs from the amount of ingredients stated above. When loafs are ready, you can use the scissors to cut out unnecessary baking paper located around the loafs.

Once oven reached right temperature, put tray or rack inside and wait. Be careful not to put loafs too close to heating elements, or they may be burned. Wait for 1 hour and 55 minutes and turn off the oven (such long baking time is necessary, otherwise interior of the gingerbread wont be able to heat up enough). After the baking process is done, you can open oven from time to time, so that moisture can escape. Wipe any excessive water that condensed inside the oven.

After few additional hours in slowly cooling oven, you should be able take the loafs out (but if you are in a hurry probably nothing bad will happen if you will take them out sooner, just be careful not to burn your skin). When I measured masses of the loafs approximately 5 hours after oven was turned off, one of the loafs had 1115 g, another 940 g.

At the time of weighting, interior of the gingerbread was still quite moist, but on the next day it was considerably drier (loafs were stored in a breadbox). You should eat this gingerbread within few days, because mold easily develops in this nutritious food.

I recommend spreading some purple plum powidl or other fruit spread on the gingerbread slices if you want to enhance taste.