Chestnut Flour Dumplings with Apple and Date Filling
The time has come for the long awaited, gluten free Christmas dumplings by Ann 🙂
I’m a fan of chestnuts, no matter how they are prepared. Try the baked ones, as a healthy snack. They are rich in nutrients. But what do they have to do with dumplings? I used chestnut flour for my dumplings – that’s where the colour comes from 🙂
Chestnut flour is the most similar to a regular flour that contains gluten. My recipe is definitely not traditional, but I think it’s worth a try. Chestnut flour is also really filling – one dumpling and you’re happy 🙂 And there’s so much to eat on Christmas Eve!
Why chestnut flour behaves differently from wheat
Chestnut flour is milled from dried, roasted chestnuts, so it is a nut flour only by name. What it really carries is starch, roughly half its weight, plus natural sugars that give it a sweet, slightly toasted taste. That sweetness is why this dough needs no sweetener of its own, and why the dumplings come out brown rather than pale.
What it does not carry is gluten. In wheat dough, gluten forms an elastic net that holds the dumpling together while you roll it, fill it and boil it. Chestnut flour has nothing to build that net with, so the structure has to come from somewhere else – here it comes from hot water and from the egg.
Hot water is the trick in gluten free dough
Pouring hot water over the flour is not a shortcut to save time. Heat makes starch granules swell and burst, releasing starch into the water as a thick gel. That gel is sticky enough to hold the dough together and pliable enough to let you roll it thin, which is exactly the job gluten does in a wheat dough.
Two practical consequences. First, use water that is genuinely hot, just off the boil, not lukewarm – below about 60 C the starch barely swells and the dough stays crumbly. Second, give the dough its full hour in the fridge before you roll it. The starch keeps absorbing water while it rests, and a rested dough tears far less at the edges.
Gluten free chestnut dumplings with an apple filling
Filling
Let the dates soak in hot water and cook the apple in the meantime – peel it first, then either boil or steam it. Chop the soaked dates, put them in a saucepan along with the apple and let it simmer. Add a pinch each of cardamom, cinnamon and nutmeg, then blend it smooth. You can also add some chopped walnuts or hazelnuts. I’m unfortunately allergic to almost all of them, but I think they would fit in here.
Simmer the filling until it holds its shape on a teaspoon and no liquid runs out of it. A wet filling is the most common reason a dumpling bursts in the pot: the water turns to steam, the steam has to go somewhere, and it leaves through the seam.
Dough
Put the flour, egg, hot water, coconut oil, baking soda and cocoa into a bowl and mix it by hand (no food processors this time). Knead it until it’s smooth and even. Add a hint of cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and cloves (optionally).
Form the dough into a ball and put it into the fridge for an hour.
Rolling and sealing without cracks
Roll the dough out between two sheets of baking paper rather than straight on a floured board. Gluten free dough sticks in one direction and tears in the other, and the paper solves both at once – no extra flour goes in, so the dumplings stay tender.
Cut circles with a glass, put a teaspoon of filling into each one and seal the edges, dipping your fingers in water every time. Work in small batches and keep the rest of the dough covered, because the surface dries within minutes and a dry edge will not stick to itself. Press each seam twice: once to close it, once to thin it.
Ready to boil
Bring a pot of salted water to the boil, drop the dumplings in and wait until they bob up (about 7 to 10 minutes) – that’s when they’re ready. Don’t put too many dumplings in at once, they can stick to each other.
It’s a good idea to boil just one dumpling as a try out. Mine was still raw inside. The test dumpling tells you two things at once: whether the dough is thin enough to cook through in the time it takes to float, and whether your seam holds. If the test one opens in the pot, the filling is still too wet – simmer the rest of it down a little further before you fill the next batch.
Dumplings this filling are easier to place in a day when you can see what else you have eaten. Diet & Training by Ann keeps a gluten free version of every plan, so a sweet dinner like this one has a whole menu built around it instead of standing on its own.
What to serve them with
You can serve them with an onion chutney or a plant milk cream. I used a rice cream and sprinkled them with pomegranate arils. If you like this kind of Christmas Eve cooking, the gluten free dumplings with beetroot and dates use the same sealing technique with a different filling, and leftover chestnut flour goes into chestnut pancakes the morning after.
Not everyone wants the same spices in the filling. The ingredient swap in the app rebuilds a recipe around what you actually like, and the shopping list follows the change on its own.
YUUUUUUMY 🙂
Gluten free chestnut flour dumplings with apple and date filling
Ingredients
Method
- Pour hot water over the dates and, while they soak, cook the peeled apple in water or steam it.
- Chop the soaked dates, add the cooked apple, move everything to a saucepan and simmer over low heat.
- Add a pinch each of cardamom, cinnamon and nutmeg and blend into a smooth filling. Optionally stir in crushed walnuts or hazelnuts. Simmer until no liquid runs out of it.
- Put the chestnut flour, egg, hot water, coconut oil, baking soda and cocoa into a bowl and knead by hand, without a mixer.
- Keep kneading until the dough is smooth and even, adding a pinch each of cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and optionally cloves.
- Shape the dough into a ball and refrigerate it for 1 hour.
- Roll the dough out between two sheets of baking paper and cut circles with a glass.
- Put a teaspoon of filling into each circle and seal the edges, dipping your fingers in water every time.
- Bring a pot of salted water to the boil and drop the dumplings in batches so they do not stick. Cook until they float to the top, about 7 to 10 minutes.
- Serve with onion chutney or a plant milk cream, such as rice cream, sprinkled with pomegranate arils.
Notes
Frequently asked questions
There is no clean one to one swap, because chestnut flour brings its own sweetness and its own colour. A ready gluten free dumpling flour blend will hold together, but the dough comes out paler and much less sweet, so you may want a little more date in the filling.
Yes, and raw is better than cooked. Lay them on a floured tray so they do not touch, freeze them solid, then move them into a bag. Cook them straight from frozen and add one to two minutes to the boiling time.
Almost always because of the filling rather than the dough. Liquid in the filling turns to steam, and steam forces the seam open. Simmer the apple and date mixture until it holds its shape on a teaspoon, and press each seam twice before boiling.
Two to three days in a closed container in the fridge. Reheat them in a dry pan or briefly in a steamer, not in water, or the dough goes soft.
Roughly 320 to 380 kcal for a serving of four to five filled dumplings, depending on how many dates and nuts go into the filling. If you want the figure for your own plate rather than an average, the AI Calorie Calculator in Diet & Training by Ann reads the calories and macros off a photo, so you do not have to weigh each dumpling.
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