Setting Up Your Kitchen

One of the most overwhelming aspects of becoming gluten-free was the flours. Gone are the days of one bag of nutrient-poor white flour in my cupboard. These days I house about 16 different flours, starches, and other essential dry baking items in my kitchen which were never there in my pre-gluten-free days. I love a good organizational system, and once I found a system for my flours, etc. I was able to enjoy having any flour a recipe may call for on-hand at all times. I'd like to share my system with you in case you or someone you know are suffering from flour-storage hysteria too.

The first thing I did was learn a little bit about the various flours and their uses. I ruled out housing any nut flours as I have an allergy to tree nuts. After that, I went shopping. I suppose there are two possible approaches to the procurement of gluten-free flours. On the one hand you can do what I did: buy it all, house it all, have it on hand... or you could buy only the flours that a particular recipe calls for as you need them, thereby lessening your initial cost (gluten-free flours are costly compared to traditional white flour----but necessary, and worth it!).

I knew that I would need to keep my flours refrigerated or frozen. Because I had freed up a lot of space in my freezer by eliminating processed gluten-filled foods and animal products like grated cheese and ground beef, I decided the freezer would be the home for my flours. Next I needed storage containers that were not exorbitantly expensive and that were freezer safe. Eventually, I would like to become less of a plastic-user. I look forward to the day when stainless steel and glass are my only storage materials. However, I'm not there yet, and my flours are housed in plastic. Certainly you can choose a different material than I did for your storage containers. 

I chose Martha Stewart's Food Storage Collection (available in glass too). The square shaped containers easily fit one package of Bob's Red Mill gluten-free flours and they are freezer-safe. I labeled one side of the square with a sharpie and stacked them in my freezer. The lids are easy to open and they all fit on one shelf of my freezer. Thanks to the labeling, I don't have trouble finding the flour I want. 

I have found that I use brown rice flour more often than any other flour, so I bought a larger container from the same line for it and it does need to live on a different shelf.     

Surely your freezer is a different size than mine, and you may need to house even more flours than I do. You may choose to use a material other than plastic, or keep some or all of your flours in the refrigerator. Hopefully you feel inspired to devise your own organizational system. Once you find what works for you, you can happily tackle any gluten-free recipe without feeling overwhelmed by flours.