When the original Bob's Red Mill burned to the ground in 1988, in a fire the company still describes as suspected arson, the only things that survived were the millstones. That says something about the business Bob and Charlee Moore had started ten years earlier on Roethe Road in Milwaukie, Oregon. It was a mill first and a brand second, and still is: grain goes into a hopper, a shaking "damsel" feeds it into the eye of the upper stone, and the gap between the stones sets how fine the flour comes out.
The company is now 100 per cent employee-owned and sells hundreds of products in more than 70 countries, including on our shelves in Leichhardt and Crows Nest. The range is confusing in front of the shelf, so this is a flour-by-flour guide: what each one is, how it behaves, and how much you can swap into an ordinary recipe. The ratios are Bob's Red Mill's own, or King Arthur Baking's where noted, and there are two Australian labelling wrinkles worth knowing.
A mill in Milwaukie, and why stone grinding matters
The first stones, in 1978, were quartz salvaged from a defunct mill in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The ones running today are hand-quarried French burr stones from La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a flint-hard rock riddled with tiny holes. They turn slowly and stay cool, and because the whole kernel is crushed together the bran and germ stay in the flour, where a steel roller mill separates them from the starchy endosperm.
The other thing that sets the company apart is the gluten-free side. Since 2008 it has run a dedicated facility where only gluten-free products are milled, mixed and packaged. Products labelled gluten free are batch-tested in the company's own lab and are not sold as gluten free at or above 20 parts per million. That is the American bar. Australia's is stricter, so read the local label rather than the US website, a point we come back to below.
On his 81st birthday in February 2010 Bob Moore announced an employee share plan, and on 30 April 2020 the company became fully employee-owned. "I have people that have worked with me for over 30 years," he said, "and each and every one of them deserves this." He died in February 2024, aged 94.
The gluten-free blends
Gluten Free 1-to-1 Baking Flour is rice flours, sorghum, potato starch and tapioca with xanthan gum already in it. It replaces wheat flour cup for cup in non-yeast recipes: cookies, cakes, brownies, muffins, pancakes. It is not made for yeasted loaves. If you bake often it also comes in a 1.24 kg bag.
Gluten Free All Purpose Baking Flour is a different animal: chickpea and fava bean flours with potato starch, tapioca and sorghum, and no gum at all. It is meant for recipes that use baking powder or yeast, including pie crust, pasta and pizza, and you add the xanthan yourself: a quarter teaspoon per cup for cookies, half for cakes and pancakes, three-quarters for quick breads and muffins, one to one and a half teaspoons for breads and pizza. Yeasted loaves may need eggs, vinegar and more liquid too. Some bakers find the bean base a little earthy in a plain cake. Contains chickpea and fava bean.
The Gluten Free Self Raising Flour, a 680 g pack made for the Australian market, is the 1-to-1 base with baking powder, a little sugar and salt already in. Use it where a recipe calls for self-raising flour and leave out the recipe's own baking powder and salt.
Nut, coconut and whole-grain flours
None of these swap one for one with wheat flour. The percentages are how much of a recipe's flour you can replace.
- Blanched almond flour is ground from skinned sweet almonds; almond meal is skins-on and coarser. King Arthur Baking suggests about a quarter of the flour in non-yeast recipes, or up to a third of a cup per cup in yeast doughs. Cakes come out moister; all-almond cookies spread thin and fragile. Contains tree nuts. Keep it cold.
- Coconut flour, made from dried coconut flesh, absorbs far more liquid than any other flour here. Replace only a quarter to a third of a cup of regular flour per cup with the same amount of coconut flour, and increase the eggs. Recipes written for it are the safer path.
- Buckwheat flour comes from a seed, not a grain, and is unrelated to wheat despite the name. The black specks are ground hull. Assertive flavour; the flour for blini, galettes and soba. Up to 20 per cent in general baking, or half the flour in a wheat bread.
- Dark rye flour is stone-ground from whole rye berries, bran and germ included (light rye is sifted). Contains gluten, though rye gluten is weak, so an all-rye loaf is dense by nature. For peasant-style rye bread, pumpernickel, crackers and stollen.
- Spelt flour is an ancient relative of modern wheat, so it contains gluten. Mild, nutty, slightly sweet. Start at 25 per cent and go up to 50.
- Wholegrain oat flour tastes plainly of oats; 20 per cent is the conservative swap, more with xanthan added. See the labelling note below.
- Brown rice flour is stone-ground on a very fine setting to avoid grittiness. Mild and nutty, the base of most gluten-free blends. About 30 per cent.
- Teff flour is the world's smallest grain, about 100 grains to a single wheat kernel, and the flour behind Ethiopian injera. About a quarter of the flour.
- Sweet white sorghum flour is mild, sweet and pale. Add 15 to 20 per cent to a mix, with a binder.
Corn, three ways
Australian shoppers get caught here. In Australia "cornflour" means cornstarch. Bob's Red Mill's Corn Flour is American and means finely ground whole corn, bran and all. It behaves like a fine cornmeal and will not thicken a gravy.
Cornmeal is the same dried corn ground coarser, for cornbread, polenta-style porridge and crumb coatings. Masa harina is different again. The ingredients are just corn and lime: the kernels are cooked and steeped in an alkaline solution of food-grade lime (nixtamalisation), which loosens the hulls and softens the corn before grinding. That step gives tortillas, tamales, pupusas and arepas their toasted corn flavour, and cornmeal cannot stand in for it. Two cups of masa harina to one and a half cups of hot water makes 16 to 18 tortillas.
Starches, and what each one does
Tapioca flour, from the cassava root, gives gluten-free bakes chew and a golden crust and adds gloss to sauces; too much makes things tough and dry. Four tablespoons replace three of cornstarch. Arrowroot starch replaces cornstarch one for one, sets clear, suits acidic things like lemon curd but not milk-based cream sauces, and breaks down with long, high-temperature cooking. Potato starch is not potato flour (whole dried potatoes, ground, strongly flavoured); one tablespoon of cornstarch equals about one and three-quarter tablespoons of it.
Egg replacers and leaveners
The flax egg is worth memorising: one tablespoon of flaxseed meal plus three tablespoons of water, left five minutes, replaces one egg. It has no lift of its own, so add a quarter to half a teaspoon of baking powder if the recipe has none. The Egg Replacer powder (potato starch, tapioca flour, baking soda and psyllium husk) is one tablespoon to two of water per egg, left a minute to thicken. It will not scramble or whip into meringue.
Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate and needs an acid in the recipe to make gas. Baking powder is soda with its own acid (usually cream of tartar) and a starch; this one is aluminium-free and double-acting, reacting once when wet and again in the oven. Soda cannot stand in for powder. To tell an unlabelled jar apart, stir a teaspoon into a tablespoon of water: if it fizzes, it is baking powder.
Questions people ask
Are Bob's Red Mill oats gluten free in Australia?
No. Australia does not permit oats to be labelled gluten free, so the same oats sold as gluten free in the US arrive here as Wheat Free rolled oats, and the oat flour is in the same position. The Australian label is the one that counts.
Do I add xanthan gum to the 1-to-1 flour?
No, it is already in there. Add it only to the All Purpose blend, at the rates above. For a yeasted loaf, use the All Purpose blend or a recipe written for gluten-free bread, not the 1-to-1.
How should I store these flours?
Fridge or freezer for almond flour, on Bob's Red Mill's advice. Because stone-ground whole-grain flours keep the oily germ, the same is sensible for the rye, spelt, oat and brown rice flours, especially through a Sydney summer.
The full range is in the Bob's Red Mill collection online, delivered across Sydney, and on the shelf at Leichhardt and Crows Nest if you would rather read the Australian label yourself first.
