Flour made from chickpeas has more protein than regular white flour, and more fibre. But if you’ve seen headlines recently about chickpea flour’s health benefits, there are some serious caveats you should know about.

What’s all the talk about chickpea flour?

The headlines, sometimes implying that chickpea flour can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, are based on a recent study . In the study, buns made with a specific type of chickpea flour resulted in a lower blood glucose spike than buns made with regular white flour.

But the flour in the study was not the kind of chickpea flour you can find at a grocery store (often labelled gram flour or besan). It was specially manufactured to keep the plant cells intact.

Cell walls are made of fibre, and the starch in plants is contained within the cell walls. When you eat whole foods (like actual chickpeas), your body takes more time to be able to digest the starch that is inside the cells. Grinding the cells into flour, however, makes the starch more available and more quickly digested.

So what the study found was that this specific, unusual type of chickpea flour made of intact cells (PulseON is the brand name) slowed down volunteers’ digestion a bit, which is a good thing if you are trying to manage type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. They did not test grocery store chickpea flour.

What about regular chickpea flour, then?

Still, this study may have piqued your interest in regular chickpea flour. The good news is that even the grocery store type is high in protein and fibre, and can work well as part of a healthy diet. Here’s how the nutrition facts stack up:

One cup of chickpea flour (92 grams) has:

• 356 calories

• 21 grams of protein

• 6 grams of fat

• 53 grams of carbs, including 10 grams of fibre

For comparison, one cup of all-purpose white flour (125 grams) has:

• 455 calories

• 13 grams of protein

• 1 gram of fat

• 95 grams of carbs, including 3 grams of fibre

And a cup (120 grams) of whole wheat flour has:

• 408 calories

• 16 grams of protein

• 3 grams of fat

• 86 grams of carbs, including 13 grams of fibre

So the chickpea flour has more protein than either type of wheat flour, although it has slightly less fibre than whole wheat. It also has fewer calories per cup. So if you like how the macros compare, and wouldn’t mind experimenting with a different flavour profile, chickpea flour could be worth a try.

How to use chickpea flour

When you’re looking for recipes, searching for “chickpea flour” tends to turn up American style recipes that use chickpea flour as a substitute for other ingredients — like these vegan frittatas that contain no egg. Meanwhile, searching for “besan” is more likely to pull up Indian recipes like these , including its traditional use in pakora (fried dough stuffed with vegetables or meat).

If you want to make baked goods, it’s possible to substitute some chickpea flour for regular wheat flour, but find a recipe that accounts for the difference in texture. You may have to add wheat gluten, or use a mix of flours. Either way, be aware that eating more fibre than usual can be a recipe for an upset stomach, so ease into any new dietary changes.

The post Is Chickpea Flour More Nutritious Than Regular Flour? appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

There is a red binder in my kitchen cabinet, and in that red binder resides the following: A recipe for barbecue sauce I tore from a magazine years ago and never made. Scrawled instructions on a Post-it Note to remind me how to roast pumpkin seeds once a year. Directions from eHow on how to stir-fry “anything.” Countless handwritten recipes on a wide variety of paper, including stationary with inspirational quotes, stationary from my first newspaper job and, for some reason, Hello Kitty stationary I do not recall owning. There are recipes I use all the time and recipes I made once and promptly forgot about forever. It is a mess — and it’s the most organised system I have.

My other “systems” include: a folder in my email full of recipes I found online that I want to try some day . A board on Pinterest where I add recipes I find mostly by stalking my mother-in-law’s much more extensive Pinterest board. A recipe box that contains a few recipes I make once in a while and a whole bunch I don’t. And, finally, this family recipe book my husband and I received as a gift and have yet to write a single thing in. Not to mention the countless recipe books with bookmarked pages because I like the pasta salad recipe in one book but the lemon chicken orzo soup in another.

There are some recipes I want to preserve forever, like the printed-out email with detailed directions from my dad, instructing my 20-year-old self on how to make mashed potatoes for the first time. (“Add any additional milk sparingly,” he wisely advised, “because once it’s in there, you can’t take it out, and you don’t want runny potatoes.”) And the directions I wrote down one night after I called my grandma, just months before she died, to ask how to make her meatball sauce. But I need a better system.

The binder itself is a pretty good way to organise loose recipes, as I use plastic sleeves and dividers to keep my bread recipes separate from those for veggies, main courses, pastas, and desserts. But it quickly becomes overrun with things I want to try (but never will), and still I find myself rummaging through my email for that creamy tortellini soup recipe I sent to myself a few weeks ago.

Tell me in the comments: How do you organise your recipes, both online and offline? How long do you hang on to a new recipe before you decide you’re never going to make it, and it’s time to set it free? How often do you go through your physical recipes to purge the ones you don’t use? What apps or other online systems do you use to organise the recipes you don’t yet want to print? How do you even remember that you liked that spicy Thai shrimp you made from that one cookbook last week? How you keep track of and organise the endless recipe options at your disposal?

The post How Do You Organise Your Recipes? appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .

Many Twitter found their display settings suddenly changed without warning today.

For some — including me — the app swapped from the “Dim” dark mode to the fully-black “Lights Out” theme, while others are now seeing the default Light mode rather than either dark mode. Some users were unable to change their Twitter display settings back to a dark theme if their OS was set to light mode.

Good news is, if you’re unhappy with Twitter’s new look, there’s an easy explanation and an even easier fix.

Twitter recently changed its website and mobile app to automatically match your device’s theme settings, and “Lights Out” is now the app’s default dark theme. So if your computer or smartphone has dark mode on all the time, Twitter now shows up with the “Lights out” theme unless you manually change it to “Dim.”

This is also why Twitter switched to light mode instead of dark mode in some instances — the app is simply responding to the device’s system-level settings. However, Twitter told The Verge the forced light mode was an unintended bug. The bug is reportedly fixed now, so users can switch back to Dim or Lights Out in the app’s settings without having to change their device’s OS theme.

How to restore Twitter’s dark mode settings

On desktop (Windows, Mac):

1. From any Twitter page, click “More” from the sidebar to open the overflow menu.
2. Select “Display ” to open the display settings. (These options are also found under Settings and Privacy > Accessibility, Display and Languages > Display ).
3. Select your desired theme under the “Background” section. The new theme will appear automatically.

On mobile (Android, iOS):

1. Open the Twitter app then tap your profile picture to open the overflow mneu.
2. Go to Settings and privacy > Display and sound .
3. Make sure the “Dark mode” slider toggled on.
4. Select your preferred dark mode appearance.

(Note: This menu is only available on the standard Twitter mobile app. Twitter Lite doesn’t include display options.)

The post How to Fix Twitter’s Recent Dark Mode Changes appeared first on Lifehacker Australia .