Storing Gluten Free Flours

When I first found out that I needed to eliminate wheat from my diet one of my biggest fears was how would I be able to bake. For the longest time I relied only on pre-packaged gf mixes. And for a while that was fine. I was still finding my footing with the whole gluten intolerance thing and I was still able to be creative with my regular cooking. The thing about the gf mixes is that they are incredibly expensive, well at least in comparison to regular mixes. I get it, the ingredients found in the gf mixes are varied and some are on the expensive side. I never wanted to alter these in any way for fear of ruining my expensive mix and ending up with no baked product at all.

Several months ago I went on a buying binge. I bought all the different flours I had been reading about or at least the ones that seemed to be most prevalent in the recipes I have been storing. I think I ended up with six or more different flours. It ended up being quite overwhelming and I put them all in a drawer. Out of sight, out of mind. I did have some experience with Bob's Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Flour for some of my regular dishes that required a roux or thickening of some sort. This flour was awesome, but the only thing that wasn't so great was the packaging. All of Bob's Red Mill flours come in clear bags with directions to cut the top of the bag. Now, I'm a messy cook in general and these bags just made me have little flour leaks all over the place. This experience did not want to make me open up the other gazillion bags of flour I had bought before I had figured out the storage situation. I wanted something that would fit one bag, but wouldn't be too large. Many of the recipes call for a mixing of several flours, which can end up needing quite a bit of storage space. We have limited cabinet space so the right size container is a big deal.

I ended up using ball jars. Right now they are of slightly varying sizes, but they keep everything really fresh and I can see how much is left in the container. I haven't quite gotten them into the baking cabinet, but for now that's okay.



It was my mom's idea to cut out the labels and tape them to the jars. I'm not totally in love with that, but only because they don't all match. I think it's much easier to do gf baking when you have access to all your ingredients. I've been making a concerted effort to make my own "from scratch" recipes so that I can start to understand the way these flours interact with one and other. It's like a whole different kind of culinary education.