I love baking. I am also gluten-free. I also get frustrated with how complicated gluten-free recipes get these days. Coconut flour! Arrowroot flour! Guar gum! Almond flour! Flax seeds! I don't know about you, but all I see when I see those words is the amount of money it costs to buy those ingredients.
Let me tell you something that I've discovered: gluten-free baking is not at all that complicated. I promise. In fact, all those favorite recipes of yours that you had before you started the diet? You can keep about 90 percent of them. The extra 10 percent is bread. I haven't mastered that yet. But donuts, cupcakes, cake, cookies, biscuits, coffee cake, danish, cornbread, muffins, brownies, etc? Just use this recipe right here and replace regular flour with it. It hasn't failed me yet.
Rachel's gluten-free flour formula (makes 3 cups of flour)
1 1/2 cups of white or brown rice flour
1 cup of potato starch flour
1/2 cup tapioca starch flour
That's literally it! It works every time for me. Sometimes adding a little xanthan gum helps, as in a quarter of a teaspoon, but a lot of the times I get away without it. The resulting texture of this combination is identical to regular flour in cake-type baked goods and is a little more crumbly for cookies and biscuits.
However, where flour is used as a thickener, I recommend corn starch. If you are in a jam and find you are out of potato starch or tapioca starch and need to make GF flour, you can usually replace it with corn starch and make it work. Note: NOT CORN FLOUR. That is very different from corn starch!
I hope this helps! Enjoy! :)
You can find this recipe on my personal blog as well.
-Rachel
