Cooking with a million different kinds of flour

If you are gluten-free and you like to bake and you have some way of bankrolling your habit, you and I are likely to have very many kinds of flour in our kitchens.

I came up with a convenient way of keeping the oddball flours and loose grains I use most frequently neatly (more or less) organized. I have a batallion of plastic take-out containers (the kind a large order of hot and sour soup comes in?) dedicated to my cause. My health food stores all offer them, usually to hold wet bulk ingredients.

All mine are sharpie-labeled for what goes in them, and then organized in these neat pull-out trays that my new apartment has in the kitchen. Before, I had a shelf of one of my auxiliary food holding bookshelves dedicated to them. The system works really well!

That said, there is still a huge amount of overflow. I am five feet tall, so high cupboard shelves are for things I don't use very often, and the overflow bags from my flours. (The bottom cupboard shelf is easy to reach, and holds my loose spices and odd stuff. I have a mammoth spice rack from Costco that was a Christmas present from my mom that lurks off-camera.) Behold:














And then I have a drawer dedicated to bags of things that I don't have enough of to justify a whole canister, mostly nuts and chocolate chips:

I've seen frequent recommendations for gluten-free people to find your favorite GF flour mix and use it for everything. I don't agree with this, mostly because I am anal about my flours nuances and tastes matching my desired outcome. I use a different blend for almost anything. For baking, you really need a starchy flour plus a bulky flour, so I usually do rice + bulky/nutritious flour (ie. quinoa)+ tapioca/potato/both. For breading things to be fried I really like bean/chickpea based flours. I've never actually worked with straight besan flour but I really like the Bob's Red Mill blend for making fried tofu. It gets a really nice golden crust. (It's too expensive for me to bake with it often though.) And for cornbread (I will post the recipe later in the month!) I use a mix of corn flour, brown rice flour, and buckwheat.

Yay for random powdered substances taking over my kitchen!