glutenfreedirtcheap

One of the easiest things to make gluten-free is a white sauce.  It’s the same  process to make a white sauce from rice flour as it is from wheat flour:  it’s a kind of a wheat eater parity sort of food. 

White sauces are basic to cooking; they usually have other things added, like garlic or melted cheese.  They’re used in, well, wait a second….Google says white sauces are used in pizza, pasta, fish tacos, and a “standard Bechamel” sauce–which…still Googling…Wikipedia says is, “one of the mother sauces of French cuisine.”  For my purposes, though, it’s a base for fish dishes like Fisherman’s Pie, and cheese sauce.  Mmmm…cheese.

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons plain white rice flour–and here is the catch–it has to be wet-milled white rice flour either from Koda Farms in California, or from a country that wet-mills rice.   I usually buy mine from a manufacturer in Thailand, in the Asian section of my local grocery, or an Asian Grocery, if I can’t catch the October rice harvest in the U.S.  If you can’t find it locally, you can get it on amazon–although it’s twice the price, there.  (This isn’t sweet rice flour.  That’s too sweet.  It’s just regular rice flour, but it has to be wet milled.  Regular, finely ground rice flour that you can buy in a health food store isn’t ground finely enough–it won’t work for this recipe.)

4 tablespoons butter

2 cups milk or almond milk (Edit, years later, “And, “Yes, I found this out the hard way.  I have a good intuitive grasp of physics and chemistry, which has many applications; I don’t actually know as much about cooking as you might expect”:  the almond milk version is actually easier.  Real milk tends to curdle if the heat is too high.)

Salt and whatever flavorings your final recipe calls for.

Kitchen apparati:

stove

two saucepans

whisk (This can be a little whisk.  I bought a mini whisk because it was less expensive and I though it would be faster to clean.  It works just fine.)

Directions:

Turn the stove to a low medium heat.  Put the flour in the pan.  Add the butter, and whisk rapidly until all the lumps are out.  Take this sauce pan off the heat and put it on a burner on the lowest setting–if it gets too hot, the flour will start to burn, and that will give you a roux, which while useful in Cajun cooking, is not what you’re after here.  (That is, by the way, how you make a gluten-free roux.)

In another saucepan, heat 2 cups milk.  When it starts to steam, carefully add the milk to the flour butter mixture, a little at a time, and whisk.  To thicken, turn the heat up under the whole mixture to a low medium and keep stirring until it reaches a desired thickness.  (If it’s almond milk, it’s o.k. if it boils a tiny bit. If it’s real milk, if it boils, it will curdle, and you’ll lose your sauce to milk curds.)

You can also just leave it on a very low heat while you cook whatever else you are putting into the white sauce, and it will thicken, some.   Finally, add a pinch of salt and whatever spices go into your final recipe.

Cost:  About $3.00 for two cups if you use almond milk.  If you use regular milk, it’s about $2.00 for two cups.