How Do 3 Different Brands of Coconut Flour Differ? {REVIEW}

Everybody’s got some brand loyalty in their lives, whether it’s driven by slick marketing or pure good taste.

For example:

• My mother was a Jif peanut butter gal for much of my life (but news on trans fats eventually saw her switch to natural PB).
• When I was in Junior High, I simply wasn’t cool, practically wasn’t fulfilled until I had an over-the-head B.U.M. jacket. (And then I apparently was late to the party because I still wasn’t cool. Go figure.)
• Back in the day, you could forget about even tempting me to eat an off-brand M&M. Ewwwww. (Now, of course, M&Ms themselves are little bit “ew” for me, thank goodness.)
• Bet you have an affinity for either Mac or PC.

When it comes to real food, you still might get a little bit of “brand loyalty” behavior, just in a different fashion.

For example:

• You learn which farmer has the best, freshest peppers and ripest tomatoes.
• One egg is most certainly not the same as the next – I know who raises the richest eggs in GR, and I get them whenever I can.
• Almonds (use the code STEWARDSHIP for 10% off at that site!) direct from the grower top store brand, anytime.

And how about processed real food? There’s even more room for variation there:

• What’s your favorite coconut oil brand? Is it based on flavor, price, sourcing, or all of the above?
• How do you decide where to spend your discretionary dark chocolate fund?
• Do you have a favorite company for buying fermented foods, salsa and tomato sauce, healthy snacks, or frozen vegetables?

Coconut flour is definitely a real food that has a lot of variation across brands, I learned. Here’s how it all compared:

Three Brands of Coconut Flour

I’ll start by saying that there are certainly more than three major brands of coconut flour, but I felt this was a pretty good cross-section of the options out there. If you’ve never used coconut flour before, check out yesterday’s coverage of coconut flour for baking and the coconut flour muffin recipe, part of our grain-free elimination diet challenge this week.

The three brands I pitted against each other were:

• Tropical Traditions
• Honeyville Grain
• Bob’s Red Mill

You can actually see the difference:

I’d describe Tropical Traditions as the finest, most powdery. Honeyville looks almost coarse visually, and Bob’s is somewhere in between. (2015 UPDATE: I now am quite pleased with the prices at Thrive Market. They carry the Bob’s Red Mill like in this post, but also Let’s Do Organic. They deliver right to your door with 15% off your first order, so check it out!)

Testing Coconut Flour

I decided to make two recipes in which coconut flour shines using the various flours. The first and most well-documented was the grain-free coconut muffin recipe I posted yesterday.

I made the recipe exactly the same three times in a row on the same day with the three different brands of coconut flour. I took a quick video of the batter immediately after mixing in the coconut flour and then again after 5 minutes, at which time the coconut flour usually has absorbed some of the liquid in the recipe and thickened up the batter (except for the Honeyville brand, which was first and apparently I didn’t think of the “after 5 minutes” part yet).

Honeyville coconut flour video

If you can’t see the video on You Tube, click HERE.

Bob’s Red Mill Coconut flour videos

Immediately after mixing:

If you can’t see the video on You Tube, click HERE.

After 5 minutes:

If you can’t see the video on You Tube, click HERE.

Tropical Traditions coconut flour videos

Immediately after mixing:

If you can’t see the video on You Tube, click HERE.

After 5 minutes:

If you can’t see the video on You Tube, click HERE.

I also took still photos for those of you who hate watching videos, even if they’re only 15 seconds each! You can see how differently they thicken up:

Honeyville:

After 5 minutes:

You can see that the batter remains fairly loose, and also a bit of the graininess of Honeyville is evident.

Bob’s Red Mill:

After 5 minutes:

The batter starts out pretty thick and gets thicker. Bob’s demonstrates some clumping, but that doesn’t really affect the finished product.

Tropical Traditions:

After 5 minutes:

Although TT’s version does exhibit some clumping, it was more smooth in the long run than Bob’s, and the batter started out thinner and thickened up quite a bit.

Muffin Results

The look and texture of the muffins was quite markedly different for being the same recipe:

Honeyville had the least lift overall (the shortest muffin). I did try very hard to choose muffins that demonstrated the average across that brand of coconut flour. Bob’s and Honeyville both have more air holes than TT, so TT was a bit more solid, not dense as in more tightly packed, but an almost creamier quality if that’s possible in a muffin.

Here are some closeups so you can decide for yourself:

In a lot of ways, the results are kind of what I expected. TT’s flour is much more finely ground, so it integrates more thoroughly with the liquid ingredients and creates a smoother texture. Honeyville is coarse and heavier and behaves that way in the muffin, and Bob is somewhere in between, looking a lot more like Honeyville in the “crumb” but behaving more like the Tropical Traditions brand when mixing the batter.

All the muffins were plenty tasty, by the way, although I personally preferred the Trop Traditions texture the most.

I also made grain-free crepes with each of the flours, but the photos aren’t very informative. In that recipe, which is mostly eggs with just a few tablespoons of coconut flour and a pinch of salt, the Honeyville flour was less work to incorporate into the eggs because it doesn’t clump up at all. However, the crepes all turned out pretty comparably.

Which Is the Best Brand of Coconut Flour?

I always have to take cost into account, which on 3/30/2015 was:

• Honeyville: $4/lb. (organic)
• Tropical Traditions: $4.50-5.50/lb. (organic, difference between 2.2-4.4 pounds)
• Bob’s Red Mill: $6.68-7.49/lb. (organic, up to $12.95 for a single pound package in some locations)
• Thrive Market: $4.45-$5.65 (organic, depends on brand)

Since I prefer the Trop Traditions brand the most anyway based on how fine it seems (although sometimes the clumps drive me nuts) AND it seems to be the best deal of the three, I’m tipping my hat toward Tropical Traditions’ coconut flour (and it’s what I have in the basement storage, too). Watch for free shipping weekends on coconut flour at TT and grab a bag for your own kitchen.

Are expensive gadgets and specialty foods really worth the cost? Read these super-thorough reviews to see if the item you have your eye on passed the KS tests and truly lives up to the hype.

Need a bit more help? This guide is a big help when deciding what to eat, what to avoid and how to compromise. Balancing God’s gifts is about just that – balance.

I’m well known for honest, thorough product reviews…

 

…and you can always tell a real family has run these products through the gauntlet.

When I review a type of item, I try to review a LOT of different brands! From over a dozen reusable sandwich bags to over 120 natural mineral sunscreens, I’m your girl for straight-up info about natural, real foodie items you’re considering buying.

Click here to see more product reviews and you’ll also love my resources page, with REAL products that have passed my rigorous testing enough to be “regulars” in the Kimball household, plus some other comprehensive reviews. Updated at least once a year to boot the losers and add new gems!