You could fill a small freezer with all the many kinds of flour that are available these days in Tucson's supermarkets. Two that I have which are rather unusual are Corn Flour and Oat Flour, and I use them for GF purposes because my daughter avoids gluten.
If you want to make good old classic cornbread, you can do it without wheat flour as long as you substitute corn flour. But do not be fooled: corn flour is a real thing, a different grind of the corn that is not a substitute for cornmeal--nor can cornmeal be substituted for it.
You will want to observe the amount of cornmeal in your recipe, and then substitute the corn flour for wheat flour. That way you end up with the correct amount of dry ingredients and from there you are almost home. You might also want to be sure that you get medium-ground cornmeal because I find that the coarse grind is quite gritty when it is baked up.
Oat flour is a little different from wheat flour in that it seems to have less actual volume. I discovered this when I tried making shortbread cookies with oat flour and had to add more of the oat flour than the exact equivalent of wheat flour. But other than that it worked out fine.
So when you are going to make your Oatmeal-Raisin Spice Cookies, you can go gluten-free by substituting about one and a third cup of oat flour for the wheat flour and you'll never know the difference. The oat flavor that we all love in these cookies will be perfect.
If you don't have a recipe for these American standby classics, try this one.
CLASSIC OATMEAL COOKIES
Dry ingredients:
½ cup organic blonde sugar
½ cup organic brown sugar
2 cups quick-cooking organic oatmeal
2-1/2 to 2-3/4 cups organic oat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon sea salt
1 cup organic raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts (pecans if you prefer)
Wet ingredients:
½ cup organic butter at room temperature
2 beaten organic eggs, at room temperature
¼ cup organic milk, at room temperature
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Mix the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl with a whisk or wooden spoon. Combine the wet ingredients in another bowl and then turn them into the first bowl with the flour mixture. Fold the ingredients together and add the nuts and raisins last.
Make cookies the size of a ping-pong ball and then flatten them into more of a disk shape on a baking sheet. Bake them for twenty minutes and remove immediately to a cooling rack when they come out. The raisins will burn easily, and some of them can’t help being exposed to the hot cookie sheet.
This recipe was given to my mother back in the Forties when she was first married and lived in Jefferson, Iowa. The only change I made was in the use of oat flour.
You can use a hand-held electric mixer to make this stiff cookie dough, but I advise against using a stand mixer.
Check the consistency of the cookie dough as you are working with it. The quantity may be slightly affected by whether the oat flour has been in a freezer or is excessively dried out, as happens down here in Tucson. Our flours and pastas can be quite dehydrated after storing them in our desert climate.
A sheet of parchment paper on the baking sheet is the best way I know of to avoid the burned raisins that I mention above, although if you have extravagantly bought yourself Silpat sheets to use in baking they will work as well. Look at you, going all Martha Stewart on us!
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