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Rice flour is not one thing. There are several varieties, made with different kinds of rice in different parts of the world, and each has its own distinct personality. I grew up with Vietnamese foods made from rice flours,likebánh cuốn andbánh xèo, and I’ll share this: Using the wrong rice flour can really mess up a dish. Figuring out which to buy may seem tricky, but if you have some basics in your back pocket, you’ll succeed.
Rice flour is simply ground rice. Nothing else. Differences between rice flours depend on what kind of rice is featured:Regular rice flour can be ground from long-, medium-, or short-grain rice (what’s enjoyed daily in grain bowls and on rice plates).Glutinous (a.k.a. sweet) rice flour is ground from sticky rice grains (thinkbutter mochi cakes); despite the wordglutinous, there is no wheat gluten involved.
Rice contains varying combinations of two starches, amylose and amylopectin, which impact how grains cook up. Long-grain jasmine has a higher amylose to amylopectin ratio—that’s why it cooks up as separate grains. Short-grain rice, such as what’s used for sushi, has a lower ratio of amylose to amylopectin, hence its clump-ability. On the extreme end, sticky rice has no amylose and the highest amount of amylopectin.
The milling method also determines how the flour will behave in a recipe.Wet-milled rice flour is super fine and silky because the grains were soaked before being ground. It weighs less by volume and rehydrates quicker thandry-milled rice flour, which feels coarser because the grains were unsoaked before grinding. One is not better than the other. They each have their uses.
Sound confusing? Stay with me. For grocery shopping in America, remember that there are three (three!) popular kinds of rice flour to look for: Thai rice flour, Japanese rice flour, and supermarket rice flour. Always read the recipe to make sure you’re buying the right type.
Thai rice flour: regular and glutinous
When a recipe calls for Thai rice flour, it involves wet-milled regular (long-grain) rice or glutinous (sticky) rice flour. Foods such as rice noodles are traditionally made from wet-milled rice flour. Unless you’re planning to go pro, you don’t have to carefully select the rice, soak, and then grind it. Simply head to an Asian market and look in the flour-and-starch aisle for plastic bags of rice flour imported from Southeast Asia, mostly from Thailand and sometimes Vietnam. One consistent and widely distributed brand is Erawan (scan for the three-headed elephant logo).
Packaging displays multiple languages, but if you don’t speak any of them, fear not: Regardless of the brand, the bagged Thai rice flour is likely labeled inred orgreenlettering. Red-label rice flour is milled from regular rice (on the label “bột tẻ” means plain flour in Vietnamese)—that’s the rice flour for a batch of my bánh cuốn, Vietnamese rice rolls.
