If tapioca flour is safe for you (does anyone have a banana allergy?), Costco and Sam's Club both carry off and on five pound bags of either King Arthur or Bob's Red Mill gluten free AP flour for around $10/bag. That's literally some of the best GF flour prices you're going to find short of 25-50 pound bulk bags, period, and it's literally a 1:1 drop in replacement flour with AP wheat flour in recipes without any conversion fuckery... excuse my french. Almond flour can also be had for good prices in bulk from either Costco or Sam's as well.
If you need/want to blend your own flour blends, Vitacost has decent flour prices from Bob's Red Mill and their house brand, along with cheap unflavored psyllium fiber, with some good prices on certified GF rice flours. Some of the cheapest arrowroot prices we've found that aren't complete trash or fake (as in just cornstarch) have been on Amazon from a brand called PuroRaw.
As someone with celiac, however, I have to personally warn against the cheap Asian bulk rice and alterna-flours from local ethnic markets as there's frequently cross-contamination from the packaging factories, sadly... so if you gotta do strict sub 20-10ppm GF, the money you save will be paid for in pain and suffering to your health and gut, and it's just easier to buy lab batch tested GF flours instead of going, "this grain
should be clean and safe", rolling the bones, and hoping for the best. I know from experience, as we've tried and failed for me. (Though, we're kind of heading toward that future here, now, with the domestic food supply chain so it may not matter for much longer.) YMMV, however, especially if you're not hyper-sensitive, or you can find a brand locally at a good price that's generally regarded as safe in the celiac community (sadly, we don't have that local to us). (I don't want to discourage exploration, especially for the price,
especially knowing how expensive lab tested GF flours are in this country... but do be careful, especially now that we're losing FDA and USDA safety oversight in our food supply chain and I've seen an increasing loss of cheaper GF tagged whole and bulk foodstuffs.)
As far as GF breadmaking goes, it's a whole other beast from regular breadmaking, as the doughs work more like quickbreads in assembly, handling and baking than traditional breakmaking as they're a considerably wetter dough. With this in mind, I know it's sacrilege for a sourdough baker to consider it, but you're going to have a less terrible time making GF breads, especially yeast risen GF breads, in a dedicated breadmaker with a GF bread setting for different proofing times.
King Arthur has a drop-dead easy GF bread machine recipe to start on if you like. King Arthur's website actually has
a lot of good GF bread recipes, BTW (as well as some of the best GF cake mixes I've had outside of Betty Crocker's old recipe
which can be replicated.)
A resource on
how to mix and create your own various blends of GF flours for various baking and dietary restriction needs, so you're not locked into pre-made blends, especially as each flour behaves differently and imparts different tastes and textures.
Beyond that, there's no shortage of gluten-free-crunchy-paleo-tradwife-mommy-blogger website bullcrap with ten bajillion half-assed GF bread recipes and wall of text stories before you can find the print recipe button out there that their creator will die on a molehill defending as the best bread on earth, only to find the recipe deeply lacking when executed on your own. What I'm saying is, despite having the Celiac diagnosis for 15 years, and making our own GF bread and baked goods for the past five since COVID to save money, there is really no specific resource I can point to as a sole compendium of good advice and recipes. What we've found is just a hodge-podge of what we've found that works combined with experience.
Finally, I know you're mostly talking traditional bread, but I assure you that as far as tortillas go, you will burn out on the Mission or LaBandarita corn tortillas. So, I don't know where this recipe came from, or how much (if any) has been modified on our end, but have a good liquid dough recipe for GF tortillas:
LIQUID DOUGH FOR TORTILLAS
Ingredients:
3 cups of water
3 cups of GF AP flour
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon of oil
1 teaspoon baking soda
Instructions.
1 - In a saucepan or food processor, mix 3 cups of water, 3 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of oil, 1 teaspoon baking soda
2 - Over medium heat, pour a ladle of the mixture into a very hot skillet and cook until dried and slightly lightly browned on the bottom. Flip and continue cooking until done on both sides.
Next part of bad news is spoilered:
You can kiss baguettes and crusty flaky breads goodbye. It just can't be done. Sorry.
One last bit edited in at the end here... be aware of carb load on GF breads, too. Less protein and higher carb count on servings can and will get you if you're not careful. Be especially aware if anyone's diabetic, and do smaller servings by weight, size, and thickness than what you'd normally do with actual wheat breads.
Hope this helps get you started, and good luck!
