Posted by kathryn in Gluten-free and Q & A Thursday

Next in Q & A Thursday, Ann has asked for some guidelines on how to cook with non-wheat flours:

I was wondering about substitution of alternative flours – wholemeal spelt, white spelt, amaranth, barley etc – in recipes calling for wholemeal or white flour. Are there any general rules? And are some grains or combinations better substitutes than others for wheat flour?

There are more and more people out there avoiding wheat, and fortunately there are now a lot of wheat free products available. However, if you want to cook with wheat-free flours it does take some special considerations – especially if you’re using them in baking. You’ll need to do some tweaking and changing when adapting standard recipes.

I have to admit this is not one of my strong areas – I simply don’t have a lot of experience in using wheat free flours. Therefore, in this post I’m going to point you to other sites and resources covering wheat-free cooking.

• The properties of different flours: the cooks’ thesaurus has good basic information about flour. It includes a list of what’s in different flours and includes suggested combinations and substitutions. This is a useful site if you just want to reduce the amount of wheat you’re using overall.
• Flour substitutions: this site has some excellent information on flour substitutions and gluten-free baking. It includes recipes for making up your own flour combinations, to be used instead of plain and self-raising flour.
• Gluten-free cooking and baking: both Gluten-free Girl and Gluten-free Goddess are excellent resouces for information about all aspects of eating gluten-free. GF Girl has a good basic introduction to gluten: what the heck is gluten anyway and she does plenty of gluten free baking using flours like sorghum and teff. GF Goddess has a whole post on gluten-free baking tips. While it includes some US brands unavailable here, she has a basic gluten-free flour mix and lots of recipes.
• Spelt: we often use spelt in our house. I’ve made cakes with it and Richard has also used to spelt to make pasta. I haven’t found it necessary to change the original recipe when using spelt – it cooks up in a very similar way to normal wheat.

Do any readers have good suggestions on cooking without wheat flour?

What is Q & A Thursday?

This post is part of Q & A Thursday – a weekly burst of blogging, where you get to dictate the subject matter. Q & A Thursday is all about simple, practical and sensible answers to food, diet and health dilemmas sent in by readers. If you have a question you’d like answered, then either leave a comment or send me an email. For more information you can take a look at the Q & A Thursday archives.

04 October, 2007