Welcome to the World of Gluten-Free Flours!
The easiest thing to do when you are diagnosed with celiac disease or gluten-intolerance is to buy a gluten-free flour blend at a specialty or grocery store. This is perfectly fine if you are cooking occasionally for friends with Celiac or gluten-intolerance. However, if you bake and cook a lot, this can quickly become quite expensive. Learning to create your own “all-purpose” flour blend of non-gluten flours and starches is one way to help control costs.

Most regular wheat-based all-purpose flours weigh 120 to 124 grams per cup. While wheat flour blends are quite consistent, gluten-free blends can vary widely in weight per cup. Whatever gluten-free flour blend you decide to use, just measure out 120 grams to replace each cup of regular flour called for in your recipes and you will be pretty close to perfect on your first try. If your blend does not include xanthan gum or guar gum, you should consider adding 1/4 tsp per cup of flour for most baking projects and 1 tsp per cup of flour for yeast breads.

I personally keep a gluten-free flour blend that I make on hand at all times and use it in place of all-purpose flour in recipes. I have a 6-quart plastic container with a tight fitting lid that holds my AP blend (make sure it is food-safe). I use the recipe from the incredibly talented pastry chef, Silvana Nardone (the first recipe on this page). This is a wonderful neutral-flavored combination that is works well in my baking projects.

Many people include bean flours in their blends to increase the protein and nutrients in their baking. There is a definite bean flavor with these flours that can often be tasted in your baked goods. It doesn’t bother some people but I prefer to use a neutral-flavored combination when making delicately flavored items like sugar cookies, vanilla cakes, etc.

This page contains a sampling of gluten-free all-purpose blends that I have found in cookbooks and online. Feel free to try any of the following or create your own blend. Once you get more comfortable with the flours and their individual characteristics, you can create blends on the fly to suit the products you are baking. Just remember to whisk and/or shake the container very well each time before you measure out your gluten-free flour so that you get a perfectly blended sample.