Gluten-free flour can be bought or made. While buying is convenient, it poses some health problems, especially for celiacs or those with a a gluten allergy.
Making your own flour has significant advantages. You can make fresh gluten-free flour for a fraction of the price of certified gluten free flour. Uncertified gluten-free runs the risk of being cross-contaminated by contaminated equipment.
Rather than stocking rice and rice flour, chickpeas and chickpea flour, beans and bean flour etc, you can stock just rice, chickpeas and beans, then make flour as you need it.
As soon as you mill flour, it starts to oxidize, eventually causing it to break down and go rancid.
Freshly milled flour is a wonderful treat compared to bought flour. It tastes much better and is more healthy.
Gluten Free Flour: How to Grind It
There are two ways to grind your own flour. I will explain both. one requires very inexpensive and readily available equipment but it is tedious except for tiny batches. The other is requires a more significant investment but produces better, more consistent results and is much more convenient for large batches.
Gluten Free Flour With a Vitamix Blender
For large batches, I have found a Vitamix blender with a dry container to be extremely effective. This type of blender is extremely powerful and robust. The maximum speed of the blades is very high (37,000 RPM without load, not quite that fast when grinding) providing a fine and evenly milled flour.
You must have a dry container which is specifically designed for milling flour.
Add the whole grain or beans or whatever, and start the machine and rapidly bring it to full speed. Allow to run until the flour is finely milled. The problem with stopping it is that the flour drops to the bottom and doesn’t get launched up above the blades again.
Gluten Free Flour With a Coffee Grinder
You can also make flour in a coffee grinder. A coffee grinder is much cheaper than a Vitamix, but it is very inconvenient to do one or more cups of flour because that is at least four loads in the coffee grinder.
But a coffee grinder does the job. And it is more convenient in certain situations, such as grinding small amounts of flax seed.
You can do about a quarter cup of grain at a time in a coffee grinder. It works best if you shake the coffee grinder as you’re using it to prevent partially ground flour from sticking to the bottom, otherwise you will have a highly inconsistent flour.