Making Your Own Gluten-Free Flour: Part 1

Why We’re Making Gluten-Free Flour

If you’ve been following along with the Celiac Press for a while, then you’ve probably heard us talk about some of our struggles with gluten-free flour before. If you haven’t, then we’ll catch you up to speed.

One of the challenges that we’ve had from the start is Isabelle’s food sensitivities. Not only can she not eat gluten, but she can’t have some of the gluten-free substitutes, like corn starch (or any corn products, for that matter). We used to use a gluten-free flour by Pamela’s, but then we ran into issues when we learned that Peter was allergic to sorghum.

If you haven’t checked out his story about that, then here’s the short version: Peter didn’t seem to have any food sensitivities until we started using Pamela’s gluten-free flour for everything (about 1 year ago). Some foods weren’t as bad (like fried chicken, or even bread in smaller quantities), but he couldn’t eat denser baked goods (like pound cake). Then when Isabelle went out of town for school for 2 months in the summer and Peter was fine. Then she came back and he got sick again. After trying out different gluten-free flours and products, we realized that sorghum was the issue.

When we started looking into other gluten-free flour options, we realized that any that seemed to be good either had corn starch or sorghum. We’d dealt with conflicting allergies and dietary concerns before with friends and family, but this was on a whole other level. For the amount of baking that we do (including making all our own bread), this was an issue. We needed something cost-effective (as far as gluten-free flour goes), and it had to be good.

But what makes a gluten-free flour “good”?

The Basics of Gluten-Free Flour

While there’s no comparing regular flour with gluten-free flour, we’ve learned that there are some things that make some gluten-free flours better than others.

Basically, gluten-free flours are best when they are a blend of multiple flours. Straight-up rice flour tends to produce hard baked goods, while coconut flour burns very easily. We also realized that flours like sorghum (unfortunately) taste good and are more wheat-like.

From reading the ingredients in the flour that we used to use, we also realized that gluten-free flour blends that are good tend to have agents like guar gum and xanthan gum that give them a better consistency and flavor. Many of them also contain sugar (or multiple sugars), which really can’t be left out depending on the recipe.

What Could Go Wrong?

With a little bit of research into making gluten-free flour, we decided to buy a big dog-food tub on wheels for storing our flour blend and bought a few different varieties of gluten-free flour online. With some, like oat flour, we decided to buy them whole and grind them ourselves in our food processor. This was time-consuming, but it did save us some money.

Now, we didn’t do the smart thing and do a small test-batch of gluten-free flour. Nope. Instead, we decided to mix all of our flours together in our container and hope for the best. This meant that every time we decided to alter the recipe, we had to buy more of one ingredient or another to mix with our original gluten-free flour blend and make a small batch of our “new” recipe. We had many new recipes in the end.

Consistency vs. Taste

One of our biggest tests for our gluten-free flour was making bread. This is because we tend to eat it pretty regularly, and it’s much harder to make than we initially thought it would be.

Some loaves of bread were incredibly dense, while others crumbled in the toaster. We also had some that had almost no flavor, and others that were just way too sweet. Unfortunately, we needed some sugar in order to activate the yeast in our breadmaker but finding the balance of “just enough to make it rise” and “not too sweet” was pretty tough.

We hadn’t even included sugar in our gluten-free flour mix initially, but when we realized that it was a matter of flavor and consistency, we knew that (at least for bread-making) we would need to include it. This is when we decided that we would add the sugar in for specific recipes, but leave it out of our overall gluten-free flour blend.

The other issue we ran into was using gluten-free oat flour. This was actually our top ingredient in our initial blend, but we soon had to dial it back. While the oat flour sometimes made the bread seem like it was multigrain, it kind of took all of the flavor out of it. It also made the bread really dense.

That all being said, when it came to breading other foods (like chicken), our flour seemed to perform totally fine. With other things, like cookies and cakes, we had more success than with the bread. However, we still found that some of our desserts were too dense or lacked flavor.

Cost

One of the biggest issues with making our gluten-free flour was making it cost-effective. Even buying our flours in bulk, we couldn’t get the same kinds of rates that companies making much larger batches of gluten-free flour could. So not only was our flour more challenging to make and not always as good, but it was more expensive for the same amount.

Like we said, we had some workarounds. This included grinding some of the flour ourselves, and comparing prices. We wound up buying much larger quantities of some of our ingredients than we would have liked but in the end, it was more cost-effective.

The other factor that made this frustrating was how much more expensive gluten-free flour is than regular flour. Part of this we understand, but part of it was also a markup. When we looked for gluten-free flour on Amazon (where we bought most of it), most items were listed as “gourmet.” When eating gluten-free is a necessity, this is frustrating.

Can a Gluten-Free Flour “Do it All?”

In short: Not really.

Yes, there are ways to make a gluten-free flour that can do a lot. The version of our flour that we are currently on seems to work well for making bread, pizza dough, and desserts (mostly), and we’ve had no problems when we’ve used it as breading for fried or baked foods.

However, we still seem to have to make changes to our recipe depending on what we’re making. This might be because our recipe isn’t perfect yet (which we’ll get to), but we definitely think that it’s in part because of what different baked goods require. We’re still probably going to have to add sugar to our bread mix, but we probably won’t add it to our larger batch of gluten-free flour. Similarly, we sometimes add eggs (or chia eggs) when we’re adapting a regular recipe to a gluten-free one.

What Have We Learned So Far?

There’s a reason that this post is a “Part 1”: we really haven’t figured everything out yet. We’ve made a ton of progress with our gluten-free flour, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve been 100% happy with our results so far.

We’ve realized that our initial recipe wasn’t quite where we needed it to be. Our ingredient ratios were way off, and we relied more on oat flour than we probably should have.

We’ve also learned that we should have made smaller test batches of gluten-free flour from the beginning, rather than making one large one at once and trying to “fix” it as we went. Next time, we’re definitely going to make a scaled-down version before we take the full plunge.