Making Homemade Flours

Dec 9, 2024

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Introduction
When most people think of flour, they probably think of all purpose white flour. Maybe their mind goes to other wheat based flours, like whole wheat, bread, or cake flours.

But when swapping out these for other healthier, possibly gluten free flours, you may be prepared to pay more. After all, all purpose flour is dirt cheap. Below are some prices per pound for store-bought flours, sorted from cheapest to most expensive:

White Flour: $0.47
Whole Wheat Flour: $1.12
Cake Flour: $2.62
Bread Flour: $1.12
Oat Flour: $4.05
Almond Flour: $4.92
Rye Flour: $3.46
Chickpea Flour: $8.44
Millet Flour: $3.26
Spelt Flour: $3.78
Brown Rice Flour: $3.42
Coconut Flour: $2.92
Peanut Flour: $5.59
Potato Flour: $6.80

Can You Make Your Own?
Many of the flours on the list above can actually be made at home. All you need is a food processor, and you can pay just a fraction of the price. Below is a list of flours you can make, and how much they will cost you per pound:

Brown rice flour: $0.82
Oat flour: $1.52
Almond flour: $9.79
Chickpea flour: $2.62
Millet Flour: $4.16

Is It Worth It?
For some of these, making your own at home is absolutely worth it. Here's how much you'd save per pound by making your own flour at home:

Brown rice flour: $2.60 (4.2x cheaper)
Oat flour: $2.53 (2.7x cheaper)
Chickpea flour: $5.82 (3.2x cheaper)

How Do You Do It?
For all 3 of the above listed flours, all you need is a food processor (and a fine mesh strainer if you want to get fancy). Just add whole brown rice, dried chickpeas, or oats to a food processor, and blend for about a minute until it is as smooth as you can get it. Optionally, you can sift out the lumps if you want it finer, but personally I prefer the coarseness of homemade flour; it gives extra textural depth.

While I've never made brown rice flour, I do make homemade oat flour all the time. I've never bought oat flour; I just chuck some rolled oats in a food processor, blend them, and store the flour in my cabinet for when I need it to bake. Below are just a handful of recipes that all use homemade oat flour, ranging from sweet to savory:

I've only ever made chickpea flour once, and it was for these Chickpea Tortillas and Tortilla Chips. I only blended up exactly what I'd need for this recipe, but I'm sure I'll make chickpea flour again in other recipes. It would probably work just as well as oat flour in most recipes above.

Just remember that chickpea flour, as well as brown rice flour, cannot be consumed raw, as both chickpeas and brown rice must be cooked prior to consumption. Oats don't have that issue; they can be eaten raw no problemo.

What Isn't Worth It?
If you were paying attention, you'd notice that both homemade millet and almond flours are more expensive than just buying straight from the bag. :(

Making your own almond flour is likely more expensive because almond flour is blended blanched almonds. Blanched means that the skins were removed, leading to a finer flour. If you simply blend whole almonds (with the skins), then you'd end up with almond meal instead of almond flour. Almond meal does have its uses, like in these Gluten Free Biscotti, but it is much coarser than almond flour.

Making your own almond meal is cheaper than buying it though. Almond meal costs $10.72 per pound, whereas whole almonds cost $6.83 per pound. Yes, you're reading that right. Not only is almond flour cheaper than almond meal for some reason, but it's also cheaper than whole almonds as well. Strange world we live in.

Almond flour is a great gluten free alternative, adding plenty of healthy fats and vitamin E, as well as some protein and fiber. Here are a few receipts using almond flour:

Flours You Can't Make
Not every gluten or grain free alternative flour can be made at home though. There's 2 main ones I want to point to, as both of these undoergo additional processing you can't achieve at home:

Coconut flour
Peanut flour

If you were thinking that coconut flour and peanut flour were simply just finely ground coconut flakes and peanuts respectively, then you'd sadly be mistaken.

Let's start with peanut flour. Unlike almond flour, which is just blended nuts, peanut flour is made from defatted peanuts, meaning most of the fat was removed before being ground into a flour, resulting in a product with a fraction of the fat and calories, and proportionally more protein. Below is table comparing 100 g of peanut flour to 100 g of peanuts.

Food	Calories	Fat (g)	Fiber (g)	Protein (g)
Peanut Flour	417	12	17	50
Peanuts	587	50	8	24

As peanut flour is defatted peanuts turned into a flour, it makes for a great baking ingredient, especially alongside protein powder. You can also mix it with water, milk, or oil and turn it into a spread, or mix it into a stew for delicious peanut butter flavor without all the calories. Below are just some receipes utilizing peanut flour:

Peanut flour is typically sold under the brands PB2 or PBfit, but I typically just buy this Great Value Powdered Peanut Butter. All of these are mainly peanut flour, with just a little bit of salt and sugar added for flavor. I haven't been able to find just plain peanut flour at a reasonable price, so this is a compromise I'm okay with.

It's a similar story for coconut flour. Most of the fat is removed from the coconut before being ground into a flour, leading to less fat and calories, and more protein and fiber. Below is table comparing 100 g of coconut flour to 100 g of unsweetened coconut flakes.

Food	Calories	Fat (g)	Fiber (g)	Protein (g)
Coconut Flour	400	13	33	20
Unsweetened Coconut Flakes	667	60	20	7

I've definitely used coconut flour less in the kitchen compared to other flours like oat or peanut, but coconut flour is a great option. It's low in calories, high in fiber, midly sweet, and absorbs a ton of water, as I found in my Water Absorption of Different Flours experiment: