Overview
About Teff flour
Teff is the smallest cultivated grain in the world, a grass seed about the size of a poppy seed, and because it is too small to mill into fractions it is always eaten wholegrain: bran, germ and all.
It is the flour behind injera, the fermented sourdough flatbread that is the staple of Ethiopian and Eritrean cooking, and it is naturally free of gluten. It is also unusually rich in iron and calcium for a cereal, which is a real nutritional argument for it rather than a marketing one. The catch for coeliac readers is not the grain but the restaurant.
Sensitivities
How Teff flour scores
Watch for
What trips people up
- Injera served in restaurants is very often not pure teff. Teff is expensive and difficult to work with, so it is routinely cut with wheat or barley flour, sometimes heavily. If you are coeliac, injera is a dish to ask about explicitly rather than assume, because the grain being gluten free does not make the bread gluten free.
- Graded mild on fructans and GOS. Injera is fermented for days before baking, which reduces fermentable carbohydrate substantially, so the bread is often better tolerated than the flour figures suggest.
- Graded moderate on lectins and mild on oxalate and nickel, all consistent with a wholegrain that is eaten with its bran intact.
- Like other naturally gluten free grains, teff is exposed to cross contact in milling and transport. Coeliac readers should look for certified gluten free flour rather than relying on botany.
- Not AIP compliant, since the autoimmune protocol excludes all grains during elimination.
Diet fit
Where it fits
Swap ideas
More alternatives
FAQ
Common questions about Teff flour
Is injera gluten free?
Teff is, and injera often is not. This is one of the more consequential gaps between an ingredient and a dish. Teff contains no gluten, but teff is costly and its batter is difficult to handle, so commercial and restaurant injera is frequently made with a proportion of wheat or barley flour, sometimes a large one. Nothing about the appearance of the bread tells you which you have. If you are coeliac, ask directly whether the injera is one hundred per cent teff, and be prepared for the answer to be no even in a restaurant that assumes it is a gluten free food.
Is teff good for iron?
It is genuinely high in iron for a cereal grain, and unusually high in calcium too, which is one of the few nutritional claims about a trendy grain that holds up. Part of that is structural: teff seeds are so small that they cannot be separated into bran, germ and endosperm, so teff flour is always wholegrain and always includes the mineral rich outer layers that white wheat flour discards. Some of the iron figures in older analyses were inflated by soil contamination during traditional threshing, so treat the very highest numbers with caution, but the grain is a solid source.
What does teff taste like and how do you bake with it?
Earthy, mildly nutty and slightly molasses like, with brown teff noticeably stronger than the ivory variety. It is not a neutral flour, so it tends to be blended rather than used alone in Western baking, typically at a quarter to a third of the total. On its own it produces dense results, since there is no gluten to build structure. In its native form it is fermented into a batter over several days before being poured onto a hot clay plate, which develops both the sourness and the characteristic bubbled surface of injera.
References
Read the background
Ratings reflect the Triggerbites ingredient database and may vary with portion size and preparation.