Easy Everyday Flatbread

Note: If you haven’t eaten much flax in the past, please read the Flax Facts article before trying this recipe.

Double-decker sandwich with roast chicken, avocado, tomato, and lettuce.

Our first Mostly-Meatless Monday post is a recipe…that you can put meat on. Go figure. (I warned you yesterday, though, didn’t I?)

Seriously, this inexpensive low carb bread is also great with nut butters, or anything else you want to put on it. And there’s a story behind both the bread and that sandwich to the left.  (Feel free to scroll down to the recipe if you’re in a hurry. The stories will still be here when you come back to make the bread again!)

The Story Behind the Bread

My first adventure in making flax bread was a major disappointment. The recipe I used called for five(!) eggs to two cups of flax meal. When the bread came out of the oven, I was shocked at how little bread there was for the number of eggs used. One more egg would have made a frittata—and a frittata would have risen more than this bread did!

I gave up and resorted to low carb wraps for a while.

Then, when I decided it was time to get the grocery bill under control, I started re-examining every low carb staple I had added to  our shopping list. I wondered if I could find a substitute for low carb wraps.

I found some great low-carb wrap recipes online, but they all would have cost me more than the wraps did. I gave up again, but the idea stayed in the back of my brain.

Enter Eugene at The LowCarbist. I tried his Garlic Flax Flatbread, and  read how he had created it by accident. And I wondered if that parmesan was necessary for turning flax meal into bread.

It wasn’t. It turns out that part of the key is the thickness and the cook time. The resulting flatbread definitely costs less than those wraps. And the mild, almost bland flavor makes it a good medium for anything I want to put on it—the flavor of the sandwich fillings is what comes through.

I haven’t yet been able to turn this into actual wraps, but that’s okay. I never used wraps before I went low carb. And I don’t really need them now, when this bread works so well!

The Story Behind the Sandwich

My husband is quickly becoming my food stylist. He has more experience in restaurant work than I do, and he has an eye for presentation. So I asked him to build a sandwich I could photograph for this article.

When I saw the sandwich, though, I almost didn’t use it. My first thought was “false advertising”—surely this bread couldn’t hold all that!

Hubby convinced me to use it anyway. I snapped several shots, then we put our model in the fridge until I could check the results the next day. The next day I did indeed find a photo I liked, but I was still worried. So when hubby got home from work, I asked him to prove that the sandwich was usable—by eating it.

And he did! He pulled out one piece of chicken for the toddler, and he lost a couple of greens. But the bread held with minimum mess. Hubby wins that one—and then some!

Easy Everyday Flatbread

Ingredients

• 1 cup flax meal
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup water

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line an ungreased cookie sheet with either parchment paper or a silicone mat.
2. Stir flax meal and salt together in a mixing bowl. Add water and stir well. You will have a very sticky dough, which may be light or dense. (The dense dough will resemble a stone ball.) Place dough on the silicone mat or sheet of parchment paper on your cookie sheet.
3. You can either roll it out or pat it out. The thinness you can achieve will depend on the density of the dough; thicker dough won’t spread as thin for you. To roll out: Cover with another sheet of parchment paper, and roll out to anywhere between 1/4″ – 1/8″. To pat out: Wet hands with water. Pat out dough to anywhere between 1/4″ – 1/8″.
4. Bake for 5 – 8 minutes, or until top turns from shiny to dull and springs back when touched.
5. Store in the refrigerator for up to a week, or in the freezer up to three months.

Yield: 4 – 8 slices of bread (depending on how thin you were able to roll it).

Nutritional Information:Each of 8 slices contains approximately 4.0 g carbohydrates, 3.8 g fiber, 0.2 g net carbs, 2.6 g protein, 5.9 g fat, and 74.8 calories.

(So if you only got 4 slices out of this, you would still be under 1 net carb per slice. Excellent!)