Making Your Own Gluten-Free Flour: Part 2

The long, LONG journey of making our own gluten-free flour

It’s been several months since we wrote our “part 1” on gluten-free flour making, but there’s a good reason for that: it’s a tough process. If you haven’t checked out that earlier post (or you need a refresher) then you can read all about that here.

The short version of our story is that Isabelle has multiple food sensitivities (including corn, a very common gluten-free flour ingredient). We then found what we thought was the perfect gluten-free flour… until it turned out that Peter was allergic to the main ingredient: sorghum.

While there are other gluten-free flour options on the market that do meet both of our dietary restrictions, they don’t necessarily meet our needs. For example, Pillsbury makes a measure-for-measure flour that’s rice-based. But while we can both eat it with no issues, we find that rice-based flours like that tend to be drier, can produce harder baked goods (especially cookies), and don’t have a ton of taste. Not to mention, you can’t buy this flour in bulk. For people like us who make our own bread, that’s not an option.

Whether you’re looking to make your own flour because you’ve run into the same issues as we have or you’re trying something new because you can’t access the bread you need or want to try something new during the pandemic, we’ll cover everything we’ve learned now that we finally have a gluten-free flour blend we love.

What makes a gluten-free flour “good?”

While taste is subjective, we ultimately find that a “good” gluten-free flour is one that we can use for a variety of recipes relatively easily. We like it to be smooth and taste good, as well as we want it to hold together without being hard when we bake it.

In other words, we want it to be almost as versatile as regular flour as it can be.

Types of gluten-free flours and their purpose

A “good” gluten-free flour (at least per our definition) needs to be made from a blend of flours. The benefit of doing this yourself is that if you have a dietary restriction, you can choose what you want to include or sub out.

We found that we like gluten-free flour to be roughly 50% starch and 50% “flour”-like substitutes, with 1-2 tsp binding agent per cup of gluten-free flour. We usually use 2-3 ingredients per category.

Starches

This is where we get into our rice starches, potato starches, and cassava/tapioca. These add some firmness to the flour and some necessary hold.

The main thing to keep in mind is that if you’re using rice starch, there’s a big difference between sweet rice flour and any other rice flour. Sweet rice flour is from sticky rice so it has a gummy texture. Roughly half of our starch content is made up of this, which we find makes for an amazing flour, but if you’re not using this then you might need to increase the amount of binder you use.

“Flour”-like substitutes (for texture and taste)

We used to rely on sorghum as our main “flour”-like substitute, but we’ve found that millet flour is a great alternative. It has a nice taste and texture, and it really balances out all the starches we use. Oat flour (from gluten-free oats, of course) is another good option here, although too much of it can make the flour a little tasteless.

Binders

There are a couple of ingredients that act as great binders in gluten-free flour: xanthan gum and guar gum. They’re really necessary for making sure that your gluten-free baked goods don’t fall apart, but you don’t necessarily need them if you’re only thickening sauces or breading chicken. However, they do add a nice taste to the flour.

Grains/add-ins

If you want your flour to taste more like it’s whole grain, then we’d suggest adding either partially ground oats or whole grain millet (or other grains of your choosing) to the final flour. We’ve made the mistake of using too much of these in the past to the point that the flour was a little lumpy, but you can always add a little into your flour (or into a loaf of bread) for some added texture.

The logistics of making a large quantity of gluten-free flour

We cannot stress enough the importance of doing small-scale batch tests before mixing a 25-lb. container of gluten-free flour. The first time around when we thought we had the perfect flour recipe we just mixed it all in one go. Unfortunately, this meant that every time we wanted to alter we had to go through a lot more to figure out what our “revised” recipe would look like. This meant having some weird fractions to work with.

It’s not impossible to rework your flour recipe once you’ve mixed it, but it took us far longer than it should have to figure out the right one than it would have if we’d just done some smaller batches to begin with.

We’d also recommend that if you are happy with your recipe and you’re moving onto mixing a large batch, you should definitely work in layers. For example, we usually break down our flour into 3-4 stages of mixing so that it’s relatively even throughout. Basically, we add 1/4 of each flour, mix, add the next 1/4, and so on.

The bottom line

Making your own gluten-free flour is no easy task, but when you finally find the right recipe for you that meets all of your dietary constraints, you will have so many more baking options than you thought possible. It can be an expensive, frustrating process, but small-scale batch testing helps immensely.

We would also highly suggest that you write everything down along the way. We have a shared Google Doc dating back about a year where we write down every variation of the flour. Once we were close, we would make smaller changes.

Stay tuned to see our next in-depth post about the ultimate gluten-free flour test: making gluten-free bread.