When it comes to baking gluten-free, there is definitely room for experimentation. You don’t have to feel trapped within one person’s recipes or cookbook.
It’s an opportunity to fine-tune your baking to your liking. Different flours create different tastes, textures and outcomes. Turn your home into a test kitchen to find out which one fits you perfectly.
Since I switched to baking bread for our daily sandwiches, I’ve had a few different outcomes.
I started out purchasing an all-purpose mix, but soon wanted to create my very own.
I wanted a mix that was pretty flexible, and in the long run creating my own saves money buying the ingredients in bulk and mixing it up myself.
Twinkle’s All-Purpose GF Flour Mix:
Ingredients
Makes approximately 14 cups
- 5 ¼ cups white rice flour
- 3 cups gluten-free cornstarch
- 1 ½ cups tapioca starch/flour
- 1 ½ cups brown rice flour
- 1 ½ cups gluten-free nonfat dry milk powder
- ¾ cup potato starch
- ¼ cup xanthan gum
1. First, blend your milk powder in a food processor until it is a fine powder.
2. Place it with all the other ingredients and combine well, whisking for about 5-10 minutes.
3. Store in an airtight container at room temperature.
Once you have a good blend, you can pretty much create any recipe you did pre-gluten-free.
Swap it
Substitute all-purpose gluten-free flour in place of all-purpose regular flour at a ratio of 1:1.
Exterminate!
You can omit the flour altogether in some recipes. Peanut butter cookies can be made without flour by mixing 1 cup PB, 1 cup sugar and 2 eggs. Blend and bake at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. (makes 6-7 cookies).
Make it yourself
Replace flour in a recipe with three parts white or brown rice flour, two parts potato starch and one part tapioca flour/starch. You’ll need to add 1 teaspoon of xanthan gum for every 1 ½ cups of the flour mixture. Or you can use my blend above.
What is xantham gum?
Xanthan gum is a carb created through fermentation. It starts off as a sugar in soy, wheat, dairy or corn.
Then a strain of bacteria – Xanthomonas campestris – is added to the sugar to create a gum which works as a thickener, stabilizer and emulsifier. You’ll see xanthan gum on many saIad dressing and sauce labels. If you want to make sure the xanthan gum you are buying is good for gluten-free cooking, I recommend Bob's Red Mill Xanthan Gum, which is certified gluten- and dairy-free and made from a combination of non-GMO corn and soy sugars.
Get testy
You’ll want to really experiment to get your own personal mix. When trying new flours, adjust measurements for each combination. Coconut flour, for example, can be very dry, so adding something extra for moisture, like egg or oil, will be helpful.
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Twinkle VanWinkle was born in a small town in Mississippi. A life-long lover of music, media and food, she grew up following those three things along her path. She has almost 20 years of professional cooking under her apron strings, feeding thousands of friends, family and other folks while working in restaurants and bakeries in Oxford, Miss. She baked apple pies for the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and appeared on Food Network's “The Best Of...” in the same year. Along with producing dynamic lifestyle content for LIN Media, she is a mother, musician and social media fanatic.
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