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I want to make bread and pizza dough, but all recipes I find online include other types of flours than the one I am interested in. Is it possible to make with only cricket flour? Acceptable ingredients are cricket flour, eggs, yeast, water, salt and baking powder.

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    When even the producers of cricket flour only offer recipes including more wheat than cricket, I think you are probably on a hiding to nothing.
    – Spagirl
    May 24, 2018 at 16:34
  • Probably someone looking for low–gluten flour
    – can-ned_food
    May 25, 2018 at 2:36
  • Furthermore — and pardon the frivolous comment, — If you really want to up the ante, you could consider using insect eggs. Grasshopper eggs are especially tasty.
    – can-ned_food
    May 25, 2018 at 2:42
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    From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_flour: Cricket flour is an erroneous term used to refer to powder made from crickets using various processes. Cricket flour differs from true flours made from grains by being composed mainly of protein rather than starches and dietary fibre. (emphasis mine)
    – CJ Dennis
    May 25, 2018 at 5:36
  • Soon as I get enough chitin and a weak base which can gummify the chitin while not rendering it inedible, I'll let you know how things go in an answer.
    – can-ned_food
    Jul 6, 2018 at 23:35

3 Answers 3

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I think you will be disappointed.

While a fantastic protein source, cricket flour does not contain the gluten proteins that make bread what it is. Therefore, bread made with cricket flour must get its structure somewhere else. The majority of recipes I can find are quickbreads which get their structure from added eggs blown up with baking soda. Dense and tender, not light and chewy.

Some recipes for things like cookie dough or standard bread use cricket flour as a protein enhancer but not a complete substitute for wheat flour.

If you are determined to make bread dough without wheat gluten then you will have to employ tricks from standard gluten-free recipes. Making your "bread" more like a cracker or adding gums of various types. Keep in mind that no gluten-free bread will come close to real bread and especially high protein pizza dough. They just can't get the light, crispy, chewy texture.

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    I'm guessing that cricket flour originally came about when someone's flour got infested and they passed it off as "I did that on purpose!" :D
    – PoloHoleSet
    May 24, 2018 at 21:33
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    Agreed. The original poster might want to look at "banting" recipes for "bread" - which is mostly ground seeds/nuts + some psyllium fibre bound together with (a lot of) egg+milk and lightened up with baking powder. Not bad, may take the place of bread/muffins, but not completely indistinguishable from bread either. Pizza base - not sure. I've seen some recipe using cauliflower meal for a base, never tried, never tasted, probably not translatable to crickflour.
    – frIT
    May 25, 2018 at 11:37
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I am presuming you mean cricket POWDER not cricket FLOUR in your question.

There can be some confusion as a lot of companies sell their cricket powder as cricket flour but as it is 100% milled crickets it isn't a flour and shouldn't be labelled as a flour because it leads to this sort of confusion.

There are products on the market that are labelled as cricket flour that are a mixture of flour and cricket powder. If you are using one of these then use it the same way you would use normal flour.

If you have cricket powder then you can still use it but I would advise using it as a replacement of up to 20% of whatever flour you are using in the recipe.

Using 100% cricket powder can be done but its not advisable as cricket powder is expensive and using 100% on a pizza base that won't taste nice doesn't make sense. The base will be grainy in texture and depending on the species used it could have an overpowering earthy flavour that probably put you off using it in the future.

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  • This is a very good explanation of the differences. Welcome to the site!
    – Erica
    Aug 7, 2018 at 12:06
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You could make "something" out of it.

It might even be good, but it won't be anything anybody would expect if you said you were making pizza.

Pizza crust is held together with gluten, which is something crickets don't have.

Pizza dough also rises, which is something crickets won't do. At least not when they're dead. 8-)

If you have a bunch of cricket flour, give it a try. It might even be tasty. You'll never know until you try.

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  • Yeah, I want to try, but cricket flour is expensive and I only have very little, which is why I asked if anyone knew of the correct ratios of ingredients :) I am not expecting it to be like real bread, and see this more of a fun experiment.
    – user3207230
    May 25, 2018 at 6:42

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