10 years ago the gluten free aisle was, well it wasn’t an aisle. It was a corner in the supermarket filled with cobwebs and spiders and if you dared to pull a box off the shelf it would cover you in dust! And that’s all before you even got it home and discovered it tasted like cardboard. Well things have come pretty damn far these last 10 years. Now I’m going to share with you just which Gluten Free flour in Australia you should be using! Plus read to the end for my top gluten free baking recipes for you to try!

These days if you walk through your local supermarket you’ll be amazed at just how much choice you have! Truly, I’ve seen stores with entire gluten free/health food aisles!!! There are that many products to choose from, eat and bake with. But how do you know which products to try? How do you know they’ll even work?

Gluten Free Flours = the low down

Now we all know being gluten free can suck some times. Especially so when we have to try and convert some of our beloved recipes and sweet treats into gluten free versions that you know, taste like normal. I won’t lie, it’s not always easy. But with such a heavy push from the gluten free community we now have a bevy of actually really great products to choose from. The big businesses actually listened to us and not only created great NEW products but they went back and reworked their old staples too. Now we have so many gluten free flours and baking staples to choose from it can be hard to even know where to start. Which just caused a whole new problem!

So how do you choose a nice gluten free flour to work with?

Let’s break this down for you. If you’re especially new to the gluten free world you’re probably thinking “Jeez girl, flour is flour….. right?”. MMM wrong! There is no one singular product that can replicate gluten in any form, especially baking. So instead we use a mix of flours to create a product that will work essentially like a wheaten flour choc full of gluten.

First off you need to understand that every store bought flour blend on the market is DIFFERENT to each other. They may even use similar flours to one another, but they’ll use those flours in different quantities, therefore giving you a slightly different baked good at the end of it. So how do you know which one to choose?

What’s in a flour blend?

At it’s core gluten free plain flour is a blend of different flours, anywhere between 3 to 5 are commonly used. Each type of flour has an attribute, something it brings to the mix. Some are sticky, some are light and fluffy, each plays a specific role in a blend and in turn the baked good. This is why you’ll rarely see a recipe written with just one type of gluten free flour in it. It simply won’t bake well and ultimately it will taste and look “gluten free”…. and we definitely don’t want that.

Most flour blends on the market use a mix of the common flours:

• Corn flour (maize starch)
• Tapaioca Starch
• Rice Flour (brown, white and sticky)
• Potato Starch (different to potato flour)

This is by all means not a full list, there are 100s of different types of gluten free flours in Australia and I’ve written another blog post all about them here. So if you want to understand more about what each flour does etc etc then please head across and have a read.

BUT, I know a lot of you aren’t looking for that. I mean really, you don’t need to mix your own gluten free flour blend just to bake a simple chocolate chip cookie! Once upon a time to bake successfully gluten free, yes you had to make your own blend. But when the products on the market are sooooo good there simply isn’t a need to. I mean what is a custom gluten free flour blend anyway, if not whats already on the shelf?

Choices, Choices, Choices

Below I’m going to break down the Top 6 Gluten Free Flours in Australia (in 2020) now this is not by all means an exhaustive list. But it will give you an idea on not only how to choose a gluten free flour but the confidence to do so. Remember there are lots of other smaller brand gluten free flours on the market too that bake really well. They’re just that little bit harder to find.

My focus here at Champagne and Gumboots has always been to make gluten free baking simple, easy and delicious for you. The first word being SIMPLE! So I really don’t think you should have to run around your city trying to find a particular flour blend just to get a recipe to work!

Let’s get into it: