Basic Flour Recipe

The one thing I can't live without is flour! It's the glue that holds country food together. That was punny, huh?

My first gluten-free outing took me to the mass-market store of all mass-market stores: Wal*Mart. It's not my favorite place to shop, but living in a small Western Oklahoma town gives me limited options. If United doesn't have it, I go to Wal*Mart or drive 45 minutes to OKC.

Wally stocks a small offering of gluten free products, so my shopping cart was filled with the likes of Bob's Red Mill sweet sorghum flour, oat flour, almond meal, brown rice flour, potato starch, xanthan gum, and some Gluten Free Pantry ready-made bread mixes. I also picked up some Bob's biscuit mix as well as pancake mix.

My first experiment was with Bob's biscuit mix. The ingredient list included garbanzo bean flour. This is the only product I've used with bean flour, and I believe it will be the last. The biscuits were plain nasty.

Next up, an experiment with mixing my own. In my first batch of all purpose flour, I used the sorghum. The freshly opened package had the aroma of flour that had been lost in the back of the cupboard for months on end.... spoiled. Well, being a newbie to all this, who was I to say that sorghum didn't naturally smell rancid??

Following my favorite biscuit recipe, I made some fresh hockey pucks that tasted somewhat like, oh, rancid sorghum flour. Those went in the dust bin.

Some weeks later I decided to try again. I bypassed sorghum and opted for a blend of oat and brown rice flour. This time I was happy to find my creation made crisp, fluffy biscuits, similar in texture to Bisquick biscuits.

Along with the bicsuits, I tried my newly created flour in a pan of sausage gravy. I was afraid it might not thicken up like regular wheat-flour gravy, but the surprising results was a nice, thick, gluten-free pan of sausage gravy.

I think I'll be able to live with this!

Here's my basic flour recipe:
1/2 part oat flour
1/2 part brown rice flour
1 part potato starch
1/3 part almond meal

I measure these into a zipper bag, seal, and mix well.

To every 1 cup of flour mixture in your recipe, add 3/4 tsp. xanthan gum.

Now, let's make some biscuits!

Gluten Free Biscuits

2 cups all purpose GF flour (above)
1-1/2 tsp xanthan gum
mix well

1-1/2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp cornstarch
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp soda
3/4 tsp salt
mix all dry ingredients well

Cut in 1/2 stick real butter, softened, until mixture makes small crumbs (don't be shy - stick your hands in there!)

Mix in 3/4 cup cold buttermilk

Once everything is well mixed and forms a soft ball, I either turn and knead several times in the bowl, or I stick let the mixer knead it on low speed for a couple of minutes.

Butter your hands, pinch off a dough ball, roll and flatten in your palms, and place on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake at 450 degrees until nice 'n' brown. Serve with plenty of butter and local honey.