Six Alternative Flours

Are you gluten free? Or just looking to use healthier options than your typical highly processed white flour when baking these days?

Here are 6 healthier alternatives to white flour. I’ve been using most of these for years and my kiddos love any day I decide to bake (which is most days in the winter.)

Six Alternative Flours:

1. Oat Flour: This one has to be my favorite flour to use for baking. I don’t make a lot of everyday sandwich bread with oat flour but it’s my go-to for any sweet breads (like banana and pumpkin muffins). I use oat flour in almost all of my baking. It still has that warm doughy comfort food quality that you get when you cook with wheat. Of course it will taste different than wheat flour. It’s oats. And it doesn’t have gluten, so you need the correct ingredient ratios to get it to rise. However, I use this in most of my sweet breads, and even “pizza pie” Check out my bread recipe page here to see some fun oat flour recipes we make here at home. The majority of them are oat flour. You can make your own oat flour like we have before in our food processor or a good blender (if you are patient). Or you can buy it at the store or on Amazon. We get ours from Natural Grocers for a REALLY good price. It’s ground much more fine than a food processor can get it if you buy it store bought. I typically use a combination of store bought and home made for a medium blend. It’s important to buy organic when using oats (or wheat for that matter) because non organic oats and wheat are heavily sprayed with glyphosate (a known cause of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma).
2. Almond Flour: This flour is second on the list, but not because it’s a second favorite flour. We actually rarely use almond flour for a couple of reasons. 1. My daughter has an almond intolerance (thankfully not an allergy, but we don’t bake with almonds because of it). 2.Almonds are high in oxalates (which is something I just learned about recently). Some people tolerate oxalates just fine, but for others they can cause a whole slue of problems. Here is an article about nut portions and oxalates if you are interested. 3.I typically shy away from nut flours because that’s a LOT of nuts! Most people would not eat that many nuts in one setting. And while I have nothing against nuts in general, you can really throw off your omega-6 to omega-3 ratios if you are pounding away massive amounts of nuts. It’s also high in calories…. Okay “calorie don’t count police”, before you tell me what I already know, “it’s not all about calories in calories out “, I hear you and agree 100%. Eating 100 calories of processed cereal is not the same as 100 calories of quality grass fed steak. However, one can eat far too many calorie dense nuts in baked goods before your hunger cues set in to tell you, “That’s enough!”. So be careful when cooking with nuts. I treat nut flour baked goods as a very special treat (not an every day indulgence) and eat them in small portions. I don’t have any almond flour recipes on the blog, but you can google “almond flour” just about anything and find tons of almond flour baked goods recipes. You can buy almond flour on Amazon, Thrive Market, or in the health food sections at many grocery stores.
3. Cashew Flour: For the same reasons as I mentioned above about almond flour, I don’t use cashew flour all that often. But I use it as a replacement for almond flour for any recipes that call for it due to my daughters almond intolerance. I used cashew flour to make a fun Christmas tree shaped pull apart cheesy bread for Christmas this year. The kids LOVED it. Cashews can also be high in oxalates (and can add up quickly when eaten in high quantities). This is why macadamia nuts are my favorite (and lowest oxalate) nut. They are also great if you are keto due to their high fat ratio. You can grind them up to make macadamia nut flour but that can get QUITE expensive and getting the right texture before you turn it to nut butter can be tricky since they release their oils quickly being so high in fat. We buy our cashew flour at Thrive Market. They also sell it on Amazon.
4. Casava Flour: This flour has gained popularity with the increase of people going grain free. Siete Chips are all the rage these days, due to their use of casava flour and quality oils rather than the processed seed oils most chips are made with. Casava flour can be an easy substitute for other flours in most any recipe and it has a mild taste as it comes from the casava root. You can buy Casava Flour at Thrive Market or on Amazon.
5. Arrowroot Flour: Arrowroot flour is a lot like casava flour in taste and texture. I typically don’t use it for baking as it’s expensive, and my go to is usually oat flour. However, I often use it as a thickening agent to replace corn starch in recipes. I use it when cooking Healthy Homemade Chinese Chicken and Broccoli (one of my son’s and my favorite dinners). You can buy arrowroot flour on Thrive Market or Amazon.
6. Coconut Flour: This is probably one of the trickiest replacement flours to work with. It can not replace regular flour in recipes. You have to either experiment on your own or look up coconut flour recipes to get a good quality bake. It’s very fibrous and a little goes a long way so it works well with healthy fats. Often times coconut flour recipes contain a lot of eggs or other liquids as it tends to soak up liquids and can make baked goods dry if there aren’t enough fats/liquids. Cooking with coconut flour takes practice. One of my favorite sweets recipes contains a small amount of coconut flour and is pretty fail proof. It’s my Peanut Butter Brownie Bars recipe that you can find by clicking here. You can buy coconut flour on Thrive Market or Amazon.

There you have it. These are the 6 healthier flour alternatives I sometimes use rather than wheat flour. Do you use any of these or have any favorite recipes with them? Do you have another flour that you like to use? If so, please let me know in the comment section below.

Here are some of our alternative flour baking creations…

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