When I first began baking gluten free, I used a bean flour blend for my recipes. With you all as my witnesses, I will never ever do that again. Bean flours smell awful, at every level of baking. Just no no no.
Ever since I first started using gluten free flour blends with a rice flour base, I’ve known how important a finely ground rice flour is. In fact, the two most important characteristics in a proper gluten free flour blend are how finely ground the rice flour is, and (of course) what else is in the blend to balance out that rice flour.
You could even argue that a finely ground rice is more important than a balanced blend, since you can sometimes rebalance a flour blend with other recipe ingredients (although that can be tough). But a gritty rice flour is a dead end.✋? There are two reasons for that:
One, a gritty rice flour is often the reason that people will say that a gluten free baked good is “good, for gluten free.” Not just plain good. The mouth feel of grit is just the worst. It ruins the entire experience, and frankly everyone will judge your baked goods harshly. Because they just won’t be very good.
Two, a gritty rice flour will often mean that the ingredients in a recipe simply don’t combine properly. Think of how you can combine different colors of fine sand into a lovely, unified design. But a bunch of pebbles in a jar will always have empty spaces between and among them.
There is one exception, though. If you are allowing the rice flour to rest in a mixture for a long time before baking, as in a slow rising yeast bread, gritty rice grains will soften.