Baking Wild: Gluten-Free Roasted Dock Seed Brownie Bites

Here is another absolutely delicious baking recipe for wild foraged ingredients: Gluten-free Roasted Dock Seed Brownie Bites. These are really, really good. Seriously, I am in complete awe with how delectable these dock seed brownie bites are. My extremely picky son even rates them 8 of of 10. That right there says A LOT! This recipe only makes 6 cupcake sized brownie bites. I used my Pampered Chef 6 cup stoneware muffin pan. Six muffins is the perfect amount to make when you are unsure of how your finished product will turn out or what it will taste like. Thankfully, it turned out wonderful. This is an excellent recipe for fall wild happy baking. If you are interested in baking with foraged ingredients you should also try Mossygoat Farm’s Gluten-Free Elderberry Orange Pound Cake with Orange Glaze.

Curly dock is also known as yellow dock. But don’t let the word “yellow” fool you because the seed and flour from this plant are red. It is actually the root that is yellow. Curly dock is considered to be an invasive weed in the United States. It is native to Europe and Western Europe:

The plant sends up stalks of dark red seeds in the late summer or early fall. The seeds will remain on the stalk until early spring making this an excellent plant to forage when others are unavailable. You can even see the long stalks poking out of snow. It really is quite striking in a field.

Curly dock is a member of the buckwheat family. Buckwheat, and other members of this family, do not contain gluten despite having “wheat” in the name. In fact, neither buckwheat nor curly dock are grains! They are seeds. Many people classify it as a pseudo grain although that is a very unscientific classification. Some people following the paleo diet eat buckwheat while others do not. If you are following a paleo diet please do your own research and make your own decisions on whether to eat dock seed flour or not.

Foraging for Dock Seeds and Making Roasted Dock Flour

To make this recipe you will first have to forage the seeds and make your flour. Adventure Girl did the foraging for me. She took a large paper grocery sack with her and cut off the stalks and placed them top down in the bag. When foraging you need to remember to share with the animals. She left one stalk on each plant for our animal friends. If your goal is to eradicate curly dock by preventing seeding then you can take it all.

After you have gathered your stalks you need to separate the seeds from the stalk. Simply run your fingers down the stalk letting the seeds fall into a large bowl.

Next is toasting the seeds but be warned that it is very easy to burn them. Place your seeds single layer on a cookie sheet and toast for 3 minutes. I have a counter top toaster oven and used the toaster setting. I initially followed another bloggers advice regarding toasting them and they burned and started smoking. I burned my second batch as well. Three minutes seemed to be enough time to dry them enough to allow for easy grinding and to bring out their deep flavor.

I am just going to add another little bit of warning: dock seeds do not smell that great when being toasted or when using a grinder. Actually, they smell a little like burnt rubber. Adventure girl started grinded the flour in a coffee grinder and I thought that she burnt out the motor. The motor ended up being fine, it was just the smell of the dock seeds. That smell has NOTHING to do with the final flavor of these roasted dock flour brownie bites. Do not let the smell throw you off at this stage.

To grind your toasted seeds you first need to make sure they are fully cool. Grinding creates heat and if you grind a hot product you may end up with too much heat. You can use a grain mill, coffee grinder, or the dry attachment of a Vitamix or other strong blender. I usually use my coffee grinder for small batch grinding. I did put them in the dry attachment for my Vitamix for this recipe as well. Remember: that smell is in no way indicative of the final product.

Making the Toasted Dock Seed Brownie Bites

Yield: 6

Author: Kimberly Fulmer

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Gluten-free Dock Seed Brownie Bites

Delectable foraged brownie bites with an intense chocolate flavor that accentuates the roasted dock flour.

Prep time: 15 MinCook time: 28 MinTotal time: 43 Min

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup ghee
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 cup coconut sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup roasted dock flour
• 1/8 cup gluten-free all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup raw cacao powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup dairy-free chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350℉ and line 6 muffin cups with a paper liner or generously grease a 6 cup stone muffin pan. 
2. Cream together the ghee, eggs, maple syrup, coconut sugar, and vanilla.
3. Add the dock flour, gluten free all-purpose flour, raw cacao powder, and salt. Mix well with a wooden spoon. 
4. Add chocolate chips and mix well. 
5. Evenly place your batter into the 6 muffin cups. 
6. Bake at 350℉ for 28 minutes or until your brownie bites are dry and cracked on top and a fork inserted into the top comes out clean. 

Homesteading Confessions

I believe in truth in advertising. It is easy to get overwhelmed with the thought of projects such as making your dock flour from foraged seeds and baking brownies. What you see on this page, condensed into one blog post, took about two months.

First, I had the idea that I wanted to make dock seed brownies. I was scanning Pinterest and found a post about using dock seed. It took about two weeks of wanting to harvest the dock before I finally sent my daughter out to do it for me. She loves foraging so she happily did that. I then had a large grocery bag of dock in my kitchen for probably a couple of weeks. The bag started to get in the way and finally I decided to toast the seeds. I burnt two batches, one of which you can see below. I threw out the burnt seeds and let the successfully toasted seeds cool. I placed them in a bowl, my favorite mixing bowl actually, and put them on the counter which is where they stayed until I really needed my mixing bowl. Once the flour was ground, it got stored in a cupboard for weeks until I decided to make brownie bites.

Why am I telling you this? Because I know how little time many people have. I do not want to leave anyone with the impression that I have whole days free to work on projects like this. I did not magically have the time one day to do all this. I did little by little as I had time. If you have a day to spend only foraging, making wild dock flour and brownies then that is wonderful! I usually do not and I wanted to be very clear the amount of time that elapsed from start to finish on this blog post. Many of my projects are done exactly this way, step by step and day by day.

I want to give a HUGE shout out to Learning and Yearning for the recipe I based mine off of. I cut the recipe in half and made a few tweaks but these brownie bites would not exist without her. And she has nothing to do with the burnt seeds.

As always, I love hearing from you. Please email kimberly@mossygoat.com with any questions or to let me know how you liked it! Thank you for reading and enjoy!