Swedabilly Substitutions: King Arthur Gluten-Free Bread Flour

Living outside of North America, I can’t readily get the King Arthur brand GF bread flour, which is a shame when you’re interested in trying recipes written with that particular blend in mind. A lot of other people baking GF bread think extremely well of it and King Arthur Baking’s recipes.

What can I do? I can consult their list of ingredients plus some other bakers’ flour blends, and try to formulate a pretty good functional equivalent to use in place of the inaccessible commercial blend.

Since the King Arthur blend heavily uses the properties of deglutenized wheat starch, I decided to base this approximation off a very common local commercial blend–Lailas Blue–with the ingredients “Wheat starch (max 20 ppm gluten), psyllium husk, potato fiber, thickener (guar kernel flour)“, or guar gum. It’s difficult to find plain gluten removed wheat starch here, but many commercial flour blends are primarily made from it.

I also took some guidance from a recent post on r/glutenfreebaking: I ‘ve been experimenting with CODEX wheat starch, where the author mentions that they’ve found that using wheat for 40%-50% of the total starches called for “seems to be the sweet spot“. King Arthur’s flour also mixes wheat and corn starches. So, I decided to run with a similar proportion here.

The inclusion of brown rice and sweet/glutinous rice flours is based on experience working with them, and other bakers’ blends. King Arthur’s bread flour doesn’t use those, but it made sense in my head.

It’s hard to tell exactly how much psyllium and potato fibers are already contained in the Lailas; their nutrition information lists 2.4g per 100g of starch-based flour, but that’s of both types combined. So, I am choosing to treat it as wheat starch with just a dash of psyllium and xanthan gum equivalent binders already included.

This is another flour blend where I am choosing to leave out additional binders, and add them as required in by the recipe. This makes one major departure from King Arthur’s approach.

NOTE: This blend as written is clearly not suitable for those with a wheat allergy, and it does contain a different commercial blend which may not be available where all readers live. But, you can substitute any combination of starches you prefer. I would personally go heavier on potato than tapioca, and likely include cornstarch. (Which isn’t nearly as inexpensive and widely used as potato here, so I don’t use it as much in baking.)