New to Alternative Flour? Start With These 9 Recipes

Here's a secret: Using alternative flours can add flavor to cakes, cookies, pancakes, you name it, without much extra work on your part. The whole-grain, non-all-purpose bunch—like buckwheat, oat, sorghum, and brown rice flours—offer nuttiness, sweetness, and complexity that's assertive or mild, depending on the flour.

You might call them "flavorful flavors," like Alice Medrich—pastry chef, chocolatier, and cookbook author (of the aptly named Flavor Flours)—does. "You don’t have to be living gluten-free to fall in love with some of the most flavorful flours in the baking aisle," she writes, even though many of them are naturally gluten-free. You just have to like making (or, in the case of nine of Alice's recipes below, baking) things that taste good.

Here's where to start:

Have a favorite recipe that uses or way to use alternative flour? Let us know in the comments!