An Awesome Gluten-Free Flour Mix

By Casey Knoll

My mom is from Nova Scotia, so baking was a huge part of my childhood. As soon as I could hold a measuring cup, I started to make biscuits, cookies, muffins -- you name it! Ever since then, I’ve always loved to bake, especially biscuits. They go perfectly with a nice cup of tea.

When I became gluten intolerant, baking wasn't fun anymore. I couldn't find a flour recipe that I was happy with because everything seemed to taste like sawdust, or just fell apart in the oven. Yes…there were many biscuit meltdowns.

Finally, after at least two years of sawdust-esque, flaky, crappy baked goods, I got an incredible gluten-free flour mix from a friend of mine that washed all my biscuit woes away. The recipe is at the bottom of the post, so make sure you have a look! Give it a whirl with this recipe for gluten-free orange zest raisin tea scones. 

Gluten-Free Orange Zest Raisin Tea Scones

What you'll need:

• 3 cups of the gluten-free flour mix (see below)
• 2 ½ tsp baking powder (make sure you check the ingredients. I’ve heard some brands are not gluten-free)
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ¾ cup butter
• the zest of two oranges
• 1 cup of raisins
• 1 ½ cups of milk

      What you'll need to do:

.

• Preheat the oven 350 degrees.
• Combine all of the dry ingredients in a bowl.
•  Cut in ¾ cups of butter into the flour mixture until it resembles a coarse meal.
• Stir the raisins and the orange zest into the flour.
• Gradually stir in 1 ½ cups of milk until the dough starts to cling.
• Once fully mixed, drop the batter by the spoonful onto a cookie sheet (I cover mine with parchment paper because I find the scones can stick).
• Bake the scones for about 10-15 minutes until the scones are lightly browned. This makes two pans of scones.

Here’s the flour recipe (there are a lot of different flours in this mix, but it’s worth it):

Gluten-free flour mix

What you'll need: 

• 6 cups rice flour (3 cups brown, and 3 cups white rice flour)
• 2 cups potato starch
• 1 cup tapioca flour
• 1 cup quinoa flour

What you'll need to do:

Just mix all of these flours together! 

I usually double this recipe, and put it in a big Tupperware container. After everything is mixed, you'll need to add some xanthan gum to the mixture, but the amount you'll need to add depends on what you'll be baking. It’s very important not to forget the xanthan gum! It holds everything together. Here are the proportions of xanthan gum that you'll need to add (per 1 cup of flour)  in your recipes:

• ¼ tsp for cookies
• ½ tsp for cakes
• ¾ cups for muffins or quick breads (I used this for the scones above)
• 1 ½ tsp for bread

Enjoy!