Makes 1000 grams (1 kilogram)
What if I can’t eat grains like millet or sweet rice?
Some folks who are gluten-free find that they do better without grains at all. There’s no need to fear you will never eat banana bread again. We have a grain-free mix for you too.
Put the flours and starch in the bowl of a food processor or stand mixer with the paddle attachment. Whirl them together until they are one color. You now have a flour blend. Store it in a large jar or container. You can now make any recipe in this book.
Almond flour is a wonder. It’s full of good fats and high in protein. Many people create baked goods using only almond flour. But we find that baked goods with almond flour are a little too dense for our taste. When we first combined almond flour and raw buckwheat flour, we fell in love. The flavor of these two together is warm and nutty, familiar and new at the same time. However, we have to make clear that we want you to buy raw buckwheat flour, rather than traditional buckwheat flour. Most buckwheat flours on the market are toasted buckwheat flour, which has a very distinct taste, a little too bitter for us. Raw buckwheat flour is simply raw buckwheat groats ground down into a flour. That flour is nutty and warm and so good. Buckwheat is sort of a magic flour, fairly close to wheat in many ways. (But it’s not wheat or even a grain. It’s a seed from the rhubarb family.) Ground flaxseed meal adds a warm nutty flavor to complement the buckwheat and acts as a great binder for baked goods. The potato starch and arrowroot flour here add lightness and some moisture to the mix. You can use this grain-free flour mix in almost every recipe in the book.
We highly recommend you start your sourdough starter with teff flour, which is also phenomenal in any baked good with chocolate. We use tapioca flour in our bagel recipe, to add a hint of chewiness. To sum up, you’ll need millet flour, sweet rice flour, and potato starch, plus almond flour, buckwheat flour, and arrowroot flour, plus teff and tapioca. Or, you could choose one mix like the AP and do everything with three flours.
And if you don’t want to buy and mix all these flours yourself, by the time of publication of this book, you can buy them from us directly, through our website. Go to www.glutenfreegirl.com/flours to order some today.
In some of the bready recipes in this book, the doughs that rely more on gluten than muffins or cookies would, we use a teaspoon or two of psyllium husks. These husks are high in dietary fiber, have no real taste, and absorb water like you wouldn’t believe. With these properties, a bit of psyllium husks can replicate some of the properties of gluten in doughs. Since I don’t do well with xanthan or guar gum—they give me digestive upset as though I have eaten gluten, and I’m certainly not the only one—and psyllium is widely available in every grocery store, we use psyllium in our recipes. You might wish to play with ground flaxseed or chia seeds, or if you can tolerate the gums, use xanthan instead. Feel free to play, but we’ve seen the best results with psyllium.