Make time for Roti
Gluten-free flatbread recipe is easy to make, but it will take awhile
I bought a bag of Bob’s Red Mill white rice flour in March for a Wisconsin fish fry recipe test. It was a successful test that even got our normally fish-refusing HigginsEats daughter to eat an entire piece. She even promised to eat fish again if it’s made this way.
It hasn’t been made again. After dinner I remembered why I don’t deep fry fish at home; dealing with gallons of leftover oil is a pain in the tail fin.
Meanwhile I haven’t found any use for the leftover rice flour — until now.
I’m using the No Budget Cooking Series to clear out cupboard space. Perhaps I should have put a spin on this story — playing up the gluten-free angle of using rice flour — but I didn’t choose today’s roti recipe for health reasons.
Insights
It’s kind of like a salty, pasty cracker. There’s a little bit of crunch and a little bit of chewiness, but rice flour has a distinctly different flavor than wheat flour. The rice flavor is more pronounced in a recipe with few ingredients. These Roti need to accompany either spicy or sweet foods to mute that flavor.
Did you know there’s a Milwaukie in Oregon? (I’ll let you decide if Oregonians got the spelling correct.) It’s the city where Bob’s Red Mill started.
If you need or want to cut gluten from baked goods, this is a solid recipe. The dough holds together and is easy to roll out.
The biggest drawback is the time to fry them on the skillet. Each Roti needs five to six minutes to cook. Multiply that by eight if you cannot fry more than one at a time and this becomes a time-consuming dish — especially when tacking on 10 minutes for the dough to rest.
I’ll be looking for a new recipe to finish my remaining rice flour. I really want to like these flatbreads more than I do. Maybe if I was more into glutenfree bakery I’d make them again.