Combine With Other Ingredients

• By any of its names, besan flour is high in protein and has a strong flavor. Its strong flavor makes it best for recipes that use other forceful tastes such as chocolate, honey, cinnamon or applesauce. It gives baked goods a dry, delicate crumb. To get besan to rise, however, it has to be combined with other types of flour. No matter how much yeast or leavening agent is used, besan alone won't rise because its lacks the gluten necessary to trap air bubbles from the leavening process that give baked goods lift.

No More Than 25 Percent

• To get the rest of its many benefits despite its lack of gluten, you can combine besan with wheat or spelt flour to make yeasted or leavened breads. It also mixes well with sorghum flour for other baked goods. In all cases, besan should make up no more than 25 percent of the flour in the recipe.

Increase Leavening Carefully

• It's also possible to increase the yeast or leavening agent to compensate for besan's lack of gluten, but this option requires careful measuring. For example, in yeast bread, the amount of active dry yeast could be increased by 50 percent, such as from 2 to 3 teaspoons. In a recipe using baking soda for leavening, it's better to try increasing the soda by just 25 percent to start to avoid getting a soapy flavor from too much baking soda.

Resistant Starch

• Besan also makes a good substitute for rice flour in many recipes because of its resistant starch. Unlike flour made from rice or potatoes, besan has a kind of starch that resists digestion in the small intestine, and thus it doesn't cause the kind of blood sugar spike that baked goods made from wheat flour can. This resistant quality makes besan a good ingredient when baking for people with diabetes. However, this resistant starch also means that baked goods made with besan flour can have the same kind of digestive effect that beans have with many people. The best way to offset any digestive upset is to use besan flour that's labeled "toasted," "processed," "precooked" or "micronized."