announcing the Gluten-Free Girl Flour Blends

We have been waiting nearly two years to publish this post. And for the past six months, Danny and I and our friend Claire have been dedicating nearly every minute of our work days to this endeavor, keeping it quiet that entire time.

It’s time to shout this from the rooftops. We’re elated, nervous, and ready to go. And we need your help.

For nearly a decade, we have been developing recipes for great gluten-free foods, first here on this website, and then in a series of award-winningcookbooks. Over those years, we realized that most of you don’t want to be chemists in the kitchen, mixing 8 different flours, trying to build enough to protein to create structure or add enough starch to make moist baked goods. You just want to make pancakes for your kids on Saturday morning.

A few years ago, we came up with a formula for an all-purpose flour blend that worked in every recipe we tried. We published the recipe here and hundreds of you wrote to say how much it changed you baking for the better. But most of you asked, “Can we just buy it from you?” We wanted to make the process easier, so we dropped the blend to three flours, keeping the flour blend 40% whole grain. Hundreds of people wrote to say their families loved the baked goods they made with our All-Purpose Flour Blend. This is their family flour now.

Still, most wrote people to us to say, “Can we just buy it from you?”

Two years ago, we started thinking about packaging and selling our flour blends. For the past year, we have been working on this with real dedication. To create the best gluten-free recipes, we have blended and tested dozens and dozens of different gluten-free flour blends. All for you! After much research and thousands of hours of work, we have a co-packer we trust, a package design we love, and a package manufacturer. We are ready to launch two flour blends: the Gluten-Free Girl All-Purpose Flour Blend and the Gluten-Free Girl Grain-Free Blend.

Gluten-Free Girl All-Purpose Flour Blend

* This all-purpose flour blend is 40% whole grain, making it more nutritious than most gluten-free flour blends.

* This blend contains the ancient grain millet, which is high in protein and magnesium. It also has a natural sweetness and lends a warm taste to baked goods.

* It also contains sweet rice flour, milled from “sticky” rice, which has wonderful binding qualities for gluten-free baked goods.

* The potato starch in the blend keeps everything moist and light.

* Our latest cookbook, Gluten-Free Girl Every Day, which used this flour blend for all its recipes, recently won a James Beard award.

* This blend is free of any of the top 8 allergens.

(Can I just repeat that? This flour blend is dairy-free, egg-free, peanut-free, corn-free, soy-free, tree-nut-free, and of course, fish and shellfish-free. It’s also guaranteed to be free of cross-contamination from those ingredients. This is an allergen-free blend.)

Gluten-Free Girl Grain-Free Flour Blend

This blend is meant for those who like baking with more nutrient-dense flours.

The almond flour in the grain-free blend is high in protein, low in carbohydrates, and full of good fats that create great baked goods.

The grain-free blend also contains buckwheat. (Buckwheat does not contain wheat! It’s not a grain but a pseudo-cereal, a member of the rhubarb family.) Buckwheat is low on the glycemic index, higher in protein than any grain, and full of essential amino acids. Its warm, nutty taste blends beautifully with almond flour, creating a flavor that is both enticing and familiar.

The arrowroot in the grain-free blend keeps everything moist and light.

So many gluten-free folks seem to thrive when they eat grain-free. Those of you who have been following the Paleo diet, need to bake grain-free, or those of you who want to bake with more nutritious and deeply flavorful flours? This blend is for you.

A note on this. Many of you have written to say that you like baking with our whole-grain blend, which is 70% whole grains and 30% starches. Even though this is a grain-free flour, this blend follows the same formulation of 70% more nutritious flours and 30% starches. The taste is incredible. See that apple-walnut cake? Everyone who has been eating it has loved it. They don’t care that it’s free of gluten or grains. It’s just good.

Both flour blends will be certified gluten-free and kosher. Both blends are free of any additives, preservatives, fillers, or gums.

Let me repeat that. You will not need to use xanthan or guar gum, whey protein powder, expanded modified tapioca starch, or any additives or preservatives to bake with these flours. This will simply be the flours you pull out of your pantry to start baking cookies with your kids or pie for the holidays.

(Baking bread, pizza dough, cinnamon rolls, or anything that generally requires gluten will take a pinch of psyllium. But we’ll show you exactly how to do that in a post this month.)

These are the flour blends we use in our kitchen. We’d like to bring them to your kitchen. We just need the money to make it happen.

And this is where you come in.

Today, after months and months of work, we launched a Kickstarter. (If you’re already convinced, click on that link and start pledging!)

We’ve been thinking about and working toward making these flours available commercially for years. Briefly, we played with the notion of packing the flours ourselves with printed labels and UPS. But we already have full-time careers as cookbook authors. We also have two small children. Along this journey, we’ve met talented people who grow gluten-free grains, mill them into flours, blend and pack them, as well as graphic designers and package manufacturers. We’ve created a team of people whose work ethic we admire. We like the idea of employing people by bringing you these flour blends.

Of course, in order to do this right and employ these people, we need a lot of money up front. That’s why we’re asking for your help.

So many of you here have written us moving letters, telling us what our work has meant to you and your family. Everywhere that we have gone on book tours, or taught classes, or made appearances at conferences, you have been open and loving, greeting us with happy tears or gifts for the kids. But mostly, you have so generously shared your stories of how we have helped you to feel reassured. You have come to feel like family. We cannot imagine our lives without you.

“Life can still be delicious without gluten.” That’s what I’ve been writing here since 2005. Those of you who have heard that and felt reassured? We need your help now.

We want this to be a family-owned business with the support of our internet family. Please pledge today.

The funds in this Kickstarter campaign will pay for the costs of designing and printing packages, shipping those packages, the costs of raw ingredients, packaging the flours, legal fees, employee salary, and research and development. Danny and I will not be receiving any of these funds as personal income. Frankly, we won’t even keep enough of the money to take ourselves out to dinner to celebrate once this Kickstarter is funded. Instead, we are building a company we want to thrive for many years to come. You’ll be helping thousands of other people to make good food in their kitchens by helping to fund this Kickstarter.

We’ll be bringing the Gluten-Free Girl All-Purpose Flour Blend to market first, with the Gluten-Free Girl Grain-Free Flour Blend to follow as soon as we can. As many of you might know, almond flour can cost up to 5 times as much as millet or buckwheat flour, so that blend will be quite costly to produce. If we meet our goals for this Kickstarter, we can bring the Gluten-Free Girl All-Purpose Flour Blend to market almost immediately. If you can help us not only meet but exceed this funding goal, we can bring the Gluten-Free Girl Grain-Free Flour Blend to market more quickly than we now imagine. We’d love to get that blend into your kitchen soon.

Our next cookbook, American Classics Reinvented, has 130 much-loved American comfort food recipes, such as red velvet cake, fried chicken, deep dish Chicago pizza, soft pretzels, and chocolate chip cookies. Every recipe in that book has been created and tested to work with both the Gluten-Free Girl All-Purpose Flour Blend and the Gluten-Free Girl Grain-Free Blend. We want both bends on the market by the time of publication of that book, in October of 2015.

I can’t tell you how excited we are to be launching this today. And terrified. And elated. It’s time.

Mostly, we want to be open about this process with you and how much we have done and will be doing to bring these flour blends to your home. We want to help you cook and bake. We want to help feed you.

Over the next 30 days, we’ll be updating here with stories and explanations of both these blends, recipes that use both of these blends, information about the team that is making this happen, answers to your questions, and suggestions of how you can use these flours to feed your family and friends.

That’s why we are doing this: we want to help you to live the good life, without gluten.

In order to help you, we have to ask for your help to bring these flour blends to market. After all, we could all use a little help from our friends.

Please go over to Kickstarter and start pledging today!

The post announcing the Gluten-Free Girl Flour Blends appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.