When I first started baking and cooking gluten free, about six years ago, I made the classic mistakes. I tried to bake cookies with rice flour, and they came out tasting like Chinese fortune cookies. I tried to make cream gravy with buckwheat flour, and it came out looking like mud. Etc...
I wished I could've found a website that gave me the low-down on the various flours. Because there are lots of gluten-free flours, but they all do different things. So I'm here to offer that information to you, as I've spent the last six years making lots of GF blunders. Therefore, I can tell you what NOT to do...
Rice Flour: This flour is the crux of most gluten-free baking. Most recipes will call for at least some rice flour, so keep a fair amount of it in your house. It's the filler for almost all GF flour mixtures. But the trick is this: don't single it out. Rice flour doesn't work well on its own. Instead, you've got to mix it with other things, so your baking doesn't come out too crunchy with hard, crusty exteriors.
Tapioca Flour: This stuff has a really sweet flavor to it. When you add it to rice flour, it sweetens the general flavor of whatever you're baking. But don't go overboard. Too much tapioca flour makes baked goods taste too sweet, the way adding saccharine makes stuff taste too sweet if you cook for a diabetic.
Sorghum Four: This flour adds an earthy, nutty flavor to baked goods. It's kind of like the GF version of rye, but on a milder scale. Some celiacs say that adding sorghum flour is like making the bread or baked goods taste healthier, like a seven-grain bread or a whole-grain bread might taste. I like it in my gingerbread cookies and cakes, because it provides that heavier taste that goes great in a gingerbread, but I don't like it in my sandwich bread, because I'm not a big fan of whole wheat's flavor. I do, however, find that sorghum goes okay in pancakes for some reason. So experiment with it.
Potato Starch Flour: This is a great thickener, and I also like to use this to flour a cutting board before I make cookies or roll out my pie crust. A lot of recipes call for this flour, because, like rice flour, it offers a good solid basis. When mixed with rice flour, it makes the perfect filler for most baking recipes. I keep a large staple of potato starch flour in my kitchen.
Potato Flour: This kind of flour is not to be mistaken for potato starch flour. It has more of a beige color, when compared to potato starch flour, but more importantly, it acts very differently. It's got a pastiness that other flours don't have. So, used in small amounts, it can help keep your cakes and breads from being too crumbly. But you don't need much of this stuff to do the trick. Its ability to make baked goods congeal reminds me a little of the way xanthan gum works in recipes--like an egg substitute, but not quite that firm. I mix potato flour into my super fluffy GF flour mix, and I also find it can be helpful in thickening soups, when you mix it with other flours.
Corn Starch: Yes, this is actually a flour. Before I went GF, I thought of this as an ingredient like baking powder or baking soda, but corn starch is actually a flour that can be added to many baked goods to help keep them fluffy. Again, see my super fluffy GF flour mix recipe, to see how you can really fluff up your cornbread and other baked goods using corn starch in pretty big amounts.
Other Flours: There are many other flours you can buy, like garbonzo bean flour, fava bean flour, almond flour, and coconut flour that are all GF, but the ones above are the ones I keep in my kitchen at all times. I also use a lot of super-fine-ground corn meal, and it is possible to buy gluten-free oats now, as well, if your stomach can tolerate them. But I just wanted to give you a quick study of what each of the most basic gluten-free flours acts like in a recipe. I do hope this description helps you get familiar with your gluten-free flours.
