Flour power

April 15, 2022 10:19 PM

For gluten-free baked goods (like cakes , pie crusts, or cookies) do you prefer one of the All Purpose Gluten Free Flours (usually a mix of various flours including rice flour etc) or do find it best just to substitute almond flour for regular wheat flour? Bonus: any special brand of either?
posted by nantucket to Food & Drink (11 answers total)

Definitely the flour blends. Subbing in almond flour will change the texture to something much more dense and gritty and…I guess “squishy” is the word I’m looking for. I like the King Arthur Measure for Measure blend. It works pretty well for non-yeasted baked goods, provided you let the batter rest and rehydrate for 30 minutes before baking. Almond flour is great for recipes that specifically call for it but it doesn’t work very well as a wheat flour substitute.
posted by corey flood at 11:18 PM on April 15, 2022

Gluten Free on a Shoestring goes into perhaps more detail than you want. Different blends are good for different things, it depends on what you’re making. It is better to look up a gluten free recipe instead of just subbing a random blend (at least until you get an intuitive understanding of what each component of the blend does and what you’re trying to achieve).
posted by jeweled accumulation at 11:37 PM on April 15, 2022

I like a gluten free flour blend or buckwheat flour best. Almond flour/meal can be useful too, but the recipe would have to take into account how almond flour behaves. You would have unexpected results if you tried to use it in some recipes.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 4:02 AM on April 16, 2022

I’ve had good luck with Pamela’s mixes. I’m only an occasional baker, but have found they have a nice balance of flavor and texture. The Pamela’s website also has lots of recipes, which helps take out the guesswork.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 6:14 AM on April 16, 2022

There is a great book Gluten-Free Flour Power that has recipes and techniques, but also formulas (I think there are 3 or 4) for mixing up your own GF flour blends depending on what you’re making. Homemade GF flour blends are also a lot less expensive.
posted by slkinsey at 6:19 AM on April 16, 2022

Another vote for King Arthur Measure for Measure. It’s near enough wheat flour in effect that it makes no difference to me. I regularly use it for non-GF recipes and it does fine. I used to fiddle around with making my own mixes, but none of them did any better. We bulk order once or twice a year directly from KA — much cheaper than in store, particularly if you can catch a sale. They used to do a substantial sale in fall (?), but we never saw it last year, so maybe supply chain blah blah.

Have tried Pamela’s, do not like. YMMV

Bob’s Red Mill mixes are fine, but to me inferior to King Arthur’s. I do regularly buy BRM for the occasional more specialized recipes — almond meal, sorghum, etc.
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:32 AM on April 16, 2022

I feel strongly about this - after making my own mixes for many many years, the cup for cup stuff is best. My favourite is the Bob's Red Mill Cup for Cup (NOT the All-Purpose Flour; that stuff is chickpea flour-heavy and it's not great for anything where the flour is a star ingredient and particularly not for sweet items, yuck) and King Arthur is my second favourite.

I find Gluten-Free on a Shoestring's recipe-tailored mixes of flours too complicated for my home kitchen dabbling in gluten-free baked goods and I long ago got tired of keeping like ten different types of flour/starches and trying to battle against staleness and grain beetles and such. In North America there are fantastic pre-made cup for cup flours available now (Europe seems to be another story...).

Don't just sub one type of flour in most cases. For gluten-free applications, different flours do different things to try to mimic gluten-containing flour. It's fine to just use, say, corn starch if you want to thicken a gravy, but if you want to bake a cake or make bread, you almost definitely want a mix unless it's a recipe specifically built around a flour like almond.
posted by urbanlenny at 9:47 AM on April 16, 2022

Nthing King Arthur measure-for-measure for general purpose non-bread baking, such as cookies, brownies, muffins, scones, maybe quick breads. I don’t make a lot of pie crust so I’m not sure if KA is the best for that use.
posted by expialidocious at 10:43 AM on April 16, 2022

My wife prefers the mix from America’s Test Kitchen. It’s obviously more fooling around than just buying something premade.
posted by adamrice at 7:01 AM on April 17, 2022

Seconding The Bob's Red Mill Cup for Cup, I've used it in a professional setting for years(makes better madelines than regular AP!) Plus, it's an awesome, employee-owned Portland business.
posted by nenequesadilla at 7:05 PM on April 17, 2022

We use the Bob’s referred to above, but everyone’s posts made me think there was another kind we hadn’t tried. Not true when I followed the link: it says “1 for 1” not “Cup for Cup” on the bag. Maybe it used to other? Just trying to avoid confusion.

We’ve been able to use it to make reasonable facsimiles of many things: pancakes, crepes, popovers, cookies, muffins, banana/zucchini bread, even fish and chips. Usually the recipe requires little change. The more the thing you want depends on gluten, the less well it works.

I have come to believe there is no way to make bread or pizza crust or even biscuits that won’t be a disappointment (not surprising—they depend on gluten for their structure). Since my wife is the gluten-intolerant one, I just buy bread for myself.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 10:50 AM on April 18, 2022