Hey, at least you got something out the gate. I'm so fuckin' sick over here I queued up some Garth Brooks. ON GLUTEN-FREE BAKING So when you work with flour, there are only three or four different kinds of flour you really need to worry about, depending on what you're doing. All-purpose, bread flour, cake flour, whole wheat. What changes is the amount of gluten and the mixability. When you work with gluten-free baking, you're attempting to imitate the gluten and mixing characteristics of those four flavors using things that have no gluten. What you end up with is a constellation of different mixtures, each of very narrow purpose. More than that, they each have their own taste and consistency and you have to match up what you're attempting with the best combo of particles and flavors... 'cuz some shit be funky. You don't wanna use chickpea flour in a tart, for example. My wife has somewhere between eight and ten different kinds of flour that she blends per the instructions of whatever she's attempting. That's another important part - turning something gluten-free on your own is an exercise in trial and error. Her family has these semi-wretched christmas cookies that are basically a sugar cookie coated in icing. Converting them to gluten-free took about two hours of research (cumulative) and three attempts before she had a satisfactory result. They still have a whang of something (think it's chickpea flour) that the bona fides do not. They're also crisper and much fiddlier to work with. And again, getting there took three batches. She's got maybe four gluten-free cookbooks, as well as a subscription to Simply Gluten Free. She's adopted a few recipes out of there; these pancakes are particularly useful in that you can make up the powder, store it in the fridge for months and then use it like Krusteaz or Bisquick when you want to make pancakes. There's no such thing as a free lunch, though; that recipe of 12 4" pancakes has 2400 calories. Shit is fuckin' Lembas bread, only not filling. So I don't eat them. My 2-year-old daughter, however, who has jumped from 3rd percentile to 12th, piled away five of them last night so that's a win. As far as cookbooks, the Babycakes classics book is full of plenty of incredibly delicious, sweet-as-an-indian-donut-dipped-in-karo pastries that you can't go wrong with. As a bonus, you'll never need syrup ever again! The rest of our repertoire, unfortunately, is beat-to-fit, painted-to-match lore scraped off the Internet and modified over several iterations.
Yikes. When Garth Brooks makes you feel less like shitting yourself, you must be close to death! At the local fancy grocery store, they sell four varieties of pre-mixed gluten free flour. I'm gonna experiment with some others before I resort to mixing my own. Not saying I won't do it eventually, but I'm definitely going to try to take the easy way out before going for the nuclear option.
I wouldn't look at it as a nuclear option. I'd look at it as cooking. You can head down to Home Depot and buy a bag of Redi-Mix. it'll do okay for a patio. but if you're pouring a foundation you mix concrete differently than if you're pouring a patio or a sidewalk. It's all cement, water and filler, though. Recipes more than anything. Get the Babycakes book and notice the different way they blend shit up. I think most of their baking isn't "gluten free flour" it's "these three flours this time" and "these other two that time." it's cheaper that way, too.