Cooking with Janie: My All-Purpose Gluten Free Flour Mix!

As you probably guessed by now, I am 100% gluten free. In fact, my house is a gluten free zone (none of our dishes have ever touched gluten, I don't own a toaster, I live off of Udi's, etc.) Hahaha. It's just a way of life around this House of Janie. But I don't have time to mess with these crazy GF recipes that float around Pinterest and Facebook. If I can't use a regular recipe and sub. my GF flour for wheat flour, or GF pasta for wheat pasta, I'm on to the next thing!

If you're GF too, you'll know that one of the hardest things to do when preparing a meal is substituting an ingredient in a recipe. Why? Most gluten free flours aren't "cup for cup"., That means you can't use one cup of GF flour when a recipe calls for one cup of wheat flour. Sounds crazy, but the reason is quite simple. Many GF flours are quite heavy. Since cooking and baking is essentially chemistry, not only does the portion need to be correct, but so does the weight. When this balance is off, GF recipes simply fail, are dry or extremely heavy.

But who has time to compare weight for weight on a food scale? And what about the portion?

After many years of trial and error, I came up with my own all-purpose flour that was completely gluten free, made from ingredients that are easy to find and won't break the bank (like a Janie Girl does!). All of these ingredients can be found in the bulk section at WinCo and cost less than $3.00!

I just made a batch last night, and look at this scrumptious hazelnut coffee cake I made:

Are you drooling yet?

Ok, enough with the teasing... here is my step-by-step recipe. And as my motto goes, it's so simple!

Ingredients:

5 parts White Rice Flour
5 parts Brown Rice Flour
5 parts Tapioca Flour
2 parts Corn Starch

Directions:

Simply mix together. You can sift this or place it in a bowl and carefully stir. Or if you want to contain the mess, try adding ingredients to a gallon size zip-loc and shake!

Depending on how much you want, you can easily scale this recipe based on your starting size ("parts"). For my personal batch, I used a scoop that was 1/3 cup to measure the ingredients, so when I measured my "5 parts" this and "2 parts" that, I knew how much I'd end up with. You can use whatever measurement you want (1 cup, 1 Tbsp. etc.) in place of the "parts" in the recipe above. It would look something like this:

5 cups White Rice Flour
5 cups Brown Rice Flour
5 cups Tapioca Flour
2 cups Corn Starch

Once you are done, a cup of regular wheat flour from any recipe can be switched out for a cup of this.

Test it out on bake goods, sauces and more and let me know what you think in the comments!