Gluten Free

You obviously need an alternative to wheat flour to do gluten-free baking. One approach is to use a gluten-free flour blend. You can buy a blend like the one made by King Arthur but that's expensive. It's cheaper to make your own blend. The one developed by America's Test Kitchen works well (it makes great waffles). It uses 24 ounces (57%) white rice flour, 7½ ounces (18%) brown rice flour, 7 ounces (17%) potato starch or glutinous white rice flour (aka sweet white rice flour, which doesn't have any gluten), 3 ounces (7%) tapioca starch/flour, and ¾ ounce (2%) nonfat milk powder. Those are all Bob's Red Mill products that you can find at most groceries. You can also get Thai white rice flour and Thai glutinous/sweet white rice flour from a local Oriental food market. It's more finely milled and produces a less gritty end product. You have to store the blend in your fridge or freezer because of the brown rice flour, which is whole grain. If you don't want to take up precious space there, you can use the percentages to figure out how much of everything you need for a particular recipe. For example, if you're substituting for the 1 cup of flour in Plum Cake, you'd multiply each of the percentages times 125 grams (which is about what 1 cup of this flour blend weighs) and use about 71 grams white rice flour, 22 grams brown rice flour, 21 grams potato starch or sweet white rice flour, 9 grams tapioca starch, and 3 grams nonfat milk powder.

The America's Test Kitchen all-purpose blend is only 18% whole-grain flour. You can make a blend that's a lot more whole grain using 6 parts (67%) brown rice flour, 2 parts (22%) potato starch or glutinous/sweet white rice flour, and 1 part (11%) tapioca starch/flour. You can mix up a big batch using those ratios and keep it in the fridge (see the recipe below), or just keep a bag of brown rice flour in the fridge and break out what you need for that recipe. For the 1 cup of flour in the Plum Cake, that would be 83 grams brown rice flour, 28 grams potato starch or glutinous/sweet white rice flour, and 14 grams tapioca starch. The finished product is a little grittier but it tastes good. For either blend, you generally need to mix in ¼ teaspoon of xanthan gum for each 1 to 1½ cups of flour in the recipe.

The mix-it-as-you-go approach is similar to what Alice Medrich does in her terrific gluten-free baking book Flavor Flours. We've made a lot of really good stuff out of the book but it does call for many different flours, all of which are expensive and have to be parked in your fridge or freezer (other than the white rice flours). So if you try the book you may want to experiment with one flour at a time, unless you have an auxiliary fridge or freezer somewhere.

After trying a lot of different gluten-free pastas, I finally found one that is pretty good—Wegmans Organic Gluten Free Brown Rice Pasta. You can read about in episode 263. Tinkyada Brown Rice Pasta Lasagne is good for Mom's Lasagna specialty.

Click the "Gluten Free" label in the column to the right to see all the gluten-free recipes on UaKS.

UaKS Gluten-Free Flour Blend

Time: 5 minutes

This is the gluten-free flour blend Mom and I use most regularly nowadays. It seems to work well in just about everything we've tried it in.

1 (24-ounce) bag (680 grams) Bob's Red Mill brown rice flour
8 ounces (227 grams) Thai glutinous/sweet white rice flour
4 ounces (113 grams) tapioca starch

Weigh all of the ingredients into a large bowl. Whisk until thoroughly combined. Transfer to a one-gallon ziplock bag. Store in the fridge for up to 6 months. Makes 36 ounces (1,020 grams), about 8 cups (one cup of this flour blend = 125 grams/4½ ounces).