As you may have surmised from the lack of recipe posts on The Healing Kitchen lately, I have not been cooking or baking much these days. Well, I decided enough was enough, and I am ready to get back in the kitchen.
I decided to make one of my staples: gluten free waffles. Yummy and easy! Well, easy if you have enough gluten free flour mix handy. Which I did not. No worries, I thought, I will just mix up a new batch. All I need is tapioca flour (check), mung bean starch (check), and the easiest of all, brown rice flour. Hmmm... No brown rice flour. That seems odd. I was sure I had some Bob's Red Mill flour around here somewhere…
Alas, I could not find it, so I hopped on Amazon, went to my "auto-ship" section, and clicked "send new shipment now". Voila! Two days later, I had a 4-pack of brown rice flour.
Fast forward a few more days, and we are back to the task at hand: making a batch of gluten-free flour mix. As I was moving some mason jars around in the cupboard, guess what I found? Brown rice flour. I had some after all.
OK, so I have two more bags of flour, no problem. I'll just make more flour mix. After all, it is getting to be the holiday season, I can use this as an excuse to make more baked treats. This may actually be a good "problem" to have.
As I'm calculating how much I will need of each ingredient, and what I might make with all of this flour, guess what shows up on my doorstep? Another 4-pack of brown rice flour. Yes. Apparently when I checked "send new shipment now", I neglected to notice when the next auto-shipment was scheduled…. which was, well, about a week later.
Now I have brown rice flour coming out of my ears. 10 bags! Egad! So I decided to turn this into an experiment, using some other ingredients I had on hand. And that is how I came to make THREE batches of gluten-free flour mix. They all use the same ratio as my go-to recipe, but I varied the type of starch in each one.
 |
| 3 Versions of Homemade Gluten Free Flour Mix |
I love this flour mix- it measures 1:1 for regular flour in any recipe. For various reasons, I avoid potato starch, which is what Cybele uses, so I came up with a recipe that uses mung bean starch instead of potato. I previously posted that recipe here.
The recipe for the flours above are as follows:
Basic Gluten Free Flour Mix (variations)
Ingredients
18 ounces brown rice flour
2.5 ounces tapioca starch (sometimes called tapioca flour)
6 ounces EITHER mung bean starch OR arrowroot starch OR acorn starch
Process
Mix all ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. You can also use a food processor. Store in an airtight container and use 1:1 when a recipe calls for flour. Makes about 6 cups.
Where to find the ingredients
I find mung bean starch and acorn starch in Asian grocery stores. You can find arrowroot starch in most health food stores.
As I've mentioned, the mung bean version is fantastic, I have been using that mixture for years in any recipe that calls for flour. I just tested the acorn starch version in a cracker recipe, and it performed just fine. The crackers look dark because the acorn starch is dark to begin with (as you can see in the photo above)- but I did not notice any difference in taste. I will have to use it in a few more recipes and then let you know what I think. I have not used the arrowroot version yet, but perhaps I will try that in my next batch of waffles.
And for you overachievers out there, here are some links to more information about: brown rice, cassava (aka tapioca, manioc, yucca, or yuca), mung bean, acorn starch and another interesting article about acorns.
No comments:
Post a Comment