no gums in the Gluten-Free Girl Flour Blends

We are on day 11 of our Kickstarter campaign to bring the Gluten-Free Girl Flour Blends to market.

We are excited — quite over the moon — that you have helped to fund this dream of ours at 43% of its fundraising goal only 10 days into a 30-day campaign. (However, remember this: if we don’t meet our goal, we get none of the money.)

We are a little tired — all right, more than a little — because this is hard, hard work. Putting ourselves out there, asking for help, writing and asking and promoting and asking and being bold-faced quite clear we need your help. This isn’t our way. We’re much happier cooking and baking and having conversations with people instead of having all of our social media being 30 days of asking for help.

We are also more than willing to do this, to step out of our comfort zone, to jeopardize annoying some people, because we want this to work. We want this to work for us, of course. But we want this to work for you, so we can keep bringing you new recipes, better baked goods, and the ease of knowing you can cook and bake without having to do science experiments.

We are also clear about this: we know that there is no business worth it if you didn’t have to work your butt off for it. We’ve been working for two years on this, not saying anything online the entire time, because we wanted to do our research and employe consultants who could teach us how to do this well and learn the right way to do this. We’re still learning. We’ll never stop learning. But we love this hard work. As our friend Brandon told me last night, “It’s worth it. If you work it, they will come.”

We are going to be honest here. When we first dreamed up this venture, and especially when we thought about the Kickstarter campaign, we didn’t want to boast, to say ours are the best gluten-free flour blends. We thought we’d put these out there and let you decide. And of course, you will. But even a few days in, we realized we were selling ourselves short. Here’s why we are proclaiming now: we believe these are the best gluten-free blends that will be on the market. 

We are picky. We are determined to cook great food, to bake phenomenal bread. We have never settled for “good for gluten-free.” We want good. Danny can eat gluten — and he does whenever he leaves the house — so he’s our arbiter of taste. If something seems good, and he makes that face, I go back to work. He’s a trained chef, worked on the line for over 20 years at good restaurants around the country, and he thinks and dreams in food. I’m a geek, intent on figuring out protein structures and starches. We don’t settle.

If there were a gluten-free flour blend that met our needs, we would be using that blend and recommending it to you for every recipe. None of them meets our needs. That’s why we have created two blends to bring to market.

These will be the best gluten-free blends on the market.

We are proud of this fact about our flour blends: no gums. These are no xanthan gum gluten-free flour blends.  These are no guar gum flour blends. So many of you have written to say that the gums give you digestive upset. That’s true for me too. Here’s what we discovered, even more so in the last six months: gluten-free baking does not require the gums. Gluten-free baking is better without the gums. 

We are sure of this. We have played and baked and tried different ways. And in our All-Purpose Flour, we use sweet rice flour because it’s starchy enough, in a certain way, that it binds up the other flours in a baked good. You don’t need the gums if you have sweet rice flour in there. In our grain-free blend, buckwheat flour is starchy enough, in a certain way, that it acts the same way as sweet rice flour. If you are using a good recipe that has been developed well, there’s no need for gums when you use our grain-free blend.

We are bringing you two flour blends that contain nothing but flours, formulated correctly after nearly a decade of playing, that will be your family’s flour. For almost all your baking, there is no need for additives or weird ingredients you’ve never bought before or 7/8 of a teaspoon of something that costs $15 a package. With these flour blends, you just bake.

(Okay, breads are the one exception. You need a pinch of psyllium husk for breads. But that’s inexpensive. And we’ll tell you more about it next week.)

We are so proud of these flour blends. And we want you to have these flour blends. Help us fund this Kickstarter campaign and you could be baking with these flour blends soon.

We are Danny and Shauna, Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef. But we are also Claire, our consulting producer, and Desmond and Lucy and the legion of bakers who have tested these flours and the pastry chefs who have consulted for us and our co-packer and all its employees and our package designer and his family and our package manufacturer and all its employees and the people who grow the grains and the people who grind those grains and everyone who has worked to bring these flours blends to you.

We are you. We’re doing this for you. We want you to have these flours blends.

Help us help you.

Thank you.

To learn more about our All-Purpose Flour Blend, please read this. 

To learn more about our Grain-Free Blend, please read this.  

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