An absolute staple for gluten free baking, brown rice flour can be used on its own, or paired with other flours and starches. To allow for long storage, it’s usually ‘polished’, leaving just the starchy endosperm – white rice - without the fibre and very few of the nutrients and enzymes. Unlike white rice, brown rice retains the germ and bran with all their goodness. White rice flour is great for dusting your bench top when rolling out a pastry or when you need a binding flour in a mix, but for flavour and nutrient value, brown rice flour wins hands down.
 
With a fairly neutral flavour, it’s a very adaptable flour suitable for both sweet and savoury cooking. Pair it with almond meal for richness in pastry and cakes and with a starchy flour like tapioca when you need your mix to bind a little more. Unlike white rice, brown rice retains a certain grittiness, so use it in recipes which celebrate this slightly crunchy texture.    
 
Rice is the most widely consumed staple food in both Asia and Africa. It provides more than one-fifth of the calories consumed world-wide by humans. And why stop at brown rice… there’s black, red, green and even forbidden rice, waiting to be discovered…