Gluten Free Rice Flour Tortillas

As I've mentioned before on the blog, my grandkids have major food allergies. They were coming to visit us on the boat and I had to come up with some new recipes for them. One of them is allergic to wheat, the other to all forms of dairy, both of them have sensitivities to corn and potatoes. All of the starches and the xanthum gum used in typical gluten free flour mixes cause them problems. The only completely safe flour for them at the moment is rice. Trying to find a 100% rice flour tortilla recipe was daunting. I began to experiment with a few and ended up combining a couple of them to end up with this successful one. Most of the ones I tried left me with a sort of tostada crunchy tortilla, one that would not roll up or fold without cracking. This modified recipe leaves you with a soft, rollable tortilla with great flavor and consistency. 

Rice flour tortillas must be made pretty soon before eating and they don't really keep very well, so plan accordingly. Do not use white rice or sweet rice flour for these tortillas. Only brown rice flour will work. I apologize for the lack of step-by-step photos in this post, but I had three small children "helping" me so it limited my picture taking!

Ingredients:

2 c water

1 tsp salt

1-2 tsp olive oil

2 c brown rice flour

Directions:

Heat the water, salt, and oil in a small saucepan until not quite boiling. Add the flour all at once and stir vigorously with a heavy wooden spoon. The mixture will form into a stiff dough quickly and will make a ball. If it doesn't, add a bit more flour and continue to mix until a ball is formed.

Cover the ball with plastic wrap and let it stand for 10 minutes.

Knead the dough until it's smooth and consistent in texture.

Break off a plum-sized ball and roll it between sheets of parchment until it's very thin. You will need to remove the parchment, replace it loosely, flip, remove the parchment on the other side, replace it loosely, then roll again. Do this several times during the course of the rolling to prevent the dough from shrinking the paper into wrinkles.

When the dough is thin, peel one side of the paper off and flip the paper over, transferring the tortilla to a medium hot griddle or iron skillet. Peel the paper off the top and allow the tortilla to cook until bubbles form on the surface and small golden areas appear on the underside. Flip and cook until the other side is the same.

Transfer the tortilla to a plate lined with parchment. Place another parchment square on top of the tortilla and invert another plate on top. Continue to stack the tortillas between squares of parchment under the plate. The two plates will trap the moisture and the tortillas will absorb the moisture back into them, giving you soft tortillas. 

Note: There is one exception to using white rice flour. If you need a sticky tortilla to roll for chimi changas, then use sweet rice flour. The tortillas are very much harder to roll and to transfer, but they stick well to themselves with a brush of water and stretch a bit easier to contain the fillings before you fry them. The brown rice flour tortillas work best for hand held burritos and tacos, but for anything fried, they cracked when rolled tight enough. The chimi changas with the white rice flour were delicious!