Gluten Free All Purpose Flour mix

When you start going down the gluten-free road you quickly realize that baking can be very expensive if you only buy pre-made all purpose flours.  Then you can easily become overwhelmed trying to figure out how to use all the different kinds of individual flours or how to blend them yourself.  I have gone through website after website and too many cookbooks to count (along with hours in the aisle at Barnes  and Noble!).  After all of that I've tried several different blends and have come up with what I like to use best.  It is a variation of the blend made by Silvana Nardone in her book Cooking for Isaiah.  But I have found that by adding the xanthan gum into the mix a head of time there is less consistency in the finished product.  Even if you shake up the flour every time before you measure it out, you are not in the position to know what ratio of xanthan gum you have put into each cup of flour.  Because of that you can not possible keep every batch consistent.  So although I use the flours in the blend she came up with, I leave out the xanthan gum and add it to each recipe separately.  By doing that I have nearly eliminated all inconsistency issues.  It is such a relief to know that I can expect certain results instead of being so anxious each time I open the oven to find out if everything "worked out" ok.

Since I have a little OCD it seems that I do things the harder way sometimes.  But it also makes sure that everything gets really blended that way too.  First I add all the flours into one big bowl and then scoop it into a gallon zip top bag in two batches.  That way I can shake it all together and make sure that it all gets evenly mixed.  After each bag has been thoroughly shaken it is put into my permanent container.  Each time I use it I shake it up again just to be sure also.

After all of that you might be wondering how to figure out how much xanthan gum to add.  That's a great question because it took me forever to get that answer.  After all the research and more math than I've done in quite a while I came up with a number that works for me - most of the time.  I use .6 tsp for each cup.  If you don't weigh your ingredients then it would be a slightly rounded half tsp.  By weight it is somewhere between 2-3 grams.  The scale I use only breaks down grams in whole numbers so I'd have to get a better scale in order to be exact.  The only problem is that like I said, this works for me most of the time.  It is a good all purpose number to start with but there is an art to it.  If you have a drier recipe it might take a bit more and if you have a looser, more "liquidy" recipe it might take less.  And therein lies the reason there are so many recipes, brands, books, etc that offer their own flour blends!  I recently came across a blend that utilizes sweet rice flour as a component and since I'm doing some Christmas baking I thought I'd give it a try.  But for the majority of my everyday baking, this blend is a great mix to have on hand:

gluten free Pie Crust

It really makes me happy when I become "known" for some kind of baking product.  I mean when my extended family looks forward to a certain pastry that I make because mine tastes better than they can find in any store or commercial bakery.  One of those items is my pie, primarily because of my crust.  Pie crust is a finicky bugger - it needs to be flaky and light but dense enough to hold together.  For me, it needs to create a solid bottom that soaks up some of the juices from whatever filling has been put into it.  I have an old family recipe that has been a tried and true friend to me, but it is very high gluten being made up of mostly regular all purpose flour.  I looked up several recipes online but decided to see what happened if I just used my gluten free flour mix instead.  Then I went a little crazy and thought about the "fat" too.  So I tried three different varieties: 1) using regular Crisco shortening 2) using coconut oil and 3) using half butter/half coconut oil.

left to right: butter, coconut, shortening

Mixing all three pretty much went the same except the coconut oil variety needed to be kneaded a lot more than the others.  The half/half mixture was also a bit crumbly and had to be worked more.  With gluten filled flours it is best to let the crust rest for an hour or so in the fridge and I don't think that's really the case for these ones, but I did it anyway just in case.  Although I don't know if I'd do it again because it really took a long time to bring the coconut oil back to room temperature so that I could manipulate it.

Shortening

coconut oil

half coconut oil/half butter

That's actually the first problem with gluten free pie crust - it doesn't hold together nearly as well as the regular stuff and you have to handle it with tender fingers and add the right amount of xanthan gum too.  At least once you want to shape it, but before