Grain Free Rosemary & Beet Muffins

If I could go back in time I would have introduced savory muffins to my baby a lot earlier than I did. Pepper now loves savory muffins and I love that they pack a big punch with hearty ingredients and no sugar. However, the transition from a sweeter muffin (like a berry, pumpkin or apple muffin) made it a little trickier to get her to try the savory muffins I was making at first. She’d take one bite and look at me like “wait, this isn’t a muffin…” But over the past 6 months I’ve been whipping up savory muffins more often than sweet muffins and my girl loves them and isn’t surprised by them anymore. She also loves helping me bake batches of muffins on the weekends so we can enjoy them all week long. It’s a fun little activity that we both love doing together (and yes, it’s way messier to bake with a toddler but I think it’s worth it!)

A blog reader reached out a few weeks ago to see if I was able to create one of our go-to savory muffins but make it grain free. If you’ve been following along for a while you know that the base of my muffins (as of the last year) has been a combination of buckwheat, millet and amaranth flour. Whether I’m making a sweet or savory muffin that is the combination of flours that I am the most happy with. However, as someone who loves a good challenge I was up for creating a muffin recipe sans grains all together. The best part is you don’t need to soak this batter (like you do with my other muffin recipes) because there’s no grains. I know there are a lot of folks who cannot tolerate grains (even if they’re gluten free grains) so I put my thinking cap on and got to work. The result is these savory beet muffins that are made up with a combination of cassava flour and almond flour. I actually used an older beet muffin recipe of mine for inspiration for the filling but the muffins themselves are quite different using these flours. If you aren’t familiar, cassava is a nutty flavored root vegetable and can be eaten whole or in this case, dried and grated into flour. I’ve learned that cassava flour can replace wheat flour in most recipes 1:1. Anyhow, it was a fun experiment to make these muffins and I love the combination of the cassava and almond flours. The almond flour gave these muffins a nice crumb and the cassava and eggs held everything together really nicely. These are moist muffins that are hearty enough to be a mini meal on the go. My toddler loves them as much as I do. We actually made another batch this weekend but I added some local bacon to the batter to give these a little more protein and a nice rich flavor. Though the recipe below is vegetarian feel free to add some chopped bacon to your batter if you feel inclined.

I hope you all enjoy these muffins as much as we do. Now that I have some cassava flour in my cupboard I’ll be making more muffins with this same ratio. Happy baking everyone!