After all, not all flour is gluten-free, and so those with gluten intolerances won’t be able to eat food made with it. So what’s the solution? Something like potato flour!
Potato flour is exactly what it sounds like, a different type of flour that’s been made with potatoes.
Also known as potato starch, this flour is extracted from the potatoes by crushing them, releasing the starch grains from the destroyed cells of the root tubers.
The result is a flour that smells and tastes like potato, adding extra flavor and aroma to your dishes! Even better, it’s gluten-free, and it’ll make your food extra fluffy and light.
However, what do you do when you can’t get hold of potato flour at the grocery store?
This is where potato flour substitutes come in, which offer similar traits and give you a similar end product.
In our handy guide below, we’ve got the 6 best potato flour substitutes.
Whatever your tastes, you’re sure to find a potato flour alternative in our list that will help you out when you can’t get your hands on the real thing. Read on!
What Is Potato Flour?
Before we get onto our list of potato flour substitutes, it’s worth looking in more detail at just what potato flour actually is.
After all, though it’s a great alternative to regular starch, you might never have heard of it before today!
Potato flour (also known as potato starch) is just what it sounds like, a type of flour that has been made from potatoes rather than the ingredients that regular flour is typically made from.
It’s quite different from regular flour, too. For one thing, it tastes and smells a lot like potato.
If you love the delicious taste of potato (and who doesn’t!), then you’ll appreciate the extra taste and aroma it will add to your meals.
Additionally, it’s gluten-free, which not all varieties of regular flour are. This makes it suitable for people who have gluten intolerances and allergies.
It’s always a good idea to make your baking as accessible to as many people as possible.
On top of that, potato flour has a higher starch content than regular wheat flour, which makes it especially good to use in crispy coatings and thick sauces.
Potato flour is also much quicker at absorbing moisture than regular wheat flour is.
This means that you may need to adjust your recipes a little, adding more liquid to them than usual, because the potato flour will soak it up a lot quicker.
Potato Flour Substitute – 6 Best Alternatives!
Now that we’ve looked at what potato flour is, and what it can do differently to your dishes than regular wheat flour, it’s time to look at 6 great potato flour substitutes.
Potato flour is typically available in most health food stores, but may not always be easy to buy, especially if you’re only looking in regular grocery stores.
As a result, it’s good to have these 6 alternatives on hand instead, which should give your meals similar results to using potato flour.
1. Arrowroot Powder
We’re starting our list off with a potato flour substitute you may not have heard of – arrowroot powder.
This is a special type of starch that has been taken from the root of an arrowroot plant. These plants are a large type of perennial herb, and they’re chiefly found in rainforest areas.
Despite that, arrowroot flour is something that is now made commercially and you should be able to get your hands on some!
Arrowroot powder is taken from the roots of an arrowroot plant, giving you a powder that’s a great substitute for potato flour, thanks to its similar results.
Such as? Well, arrowroot powder is great for thickening your liquid foods out, such as soups, puddings, and sauces. Potato flour is also used often to thicken out sauces, so the two give you similarly great results!
On top of that, arrowroot powder is also gluten-free, making it an especially useful substitute since potato flour is gluten-free too.
With that being said, arrowroot powder isn’t just a useful product to use for food.
You see, it’s also sometimes used to help ease digestive issues like constipation, helping people to feel a little better. In addition to that, it’s good for soothing a baby’s diaper rash.
Meanwhile, arrowroot powder is also effective as a deodorant, if you mix it with things like cornflour, bicarbonate of soda, and coconut oil.
2. Mochiko Flour
Our next pick for great potato flour substitutes is mochiko flour, which is a popular ingredient used in lots of food from Japan and Hawaii.
Mochiko flour is a type of rice flour, more specifically a glutinous rice one. Its key difference to regular rice flour is in the types of rice grain that are used to make it.
While regular rice flour is made with long-grain, non-glutinous rice, mochiko is made from short-grain, glutinous sweet rice, and as a result it’s a sweet rice flour.
For this reason, it’s popular in the making of cakes, as well as savory dishes.
One of the reasons that it’s such a good for being used in desserts is that it gives food a fluffy and light feeling, as well as making them quite sticky thanks to the flour’s own sticky texture.
While mochiko flour may be a glutinous rice flour, it should be gluten-free.
This is another reason why it’s a great alternative for the also-gluten-free potato starch, because it makes your dishes more accessible!
4. Tapioca Starch
Up next on our list of great potato flour substitutes is tapioca starch, which is taken from the storage roots of a cassava plant.
These plants are native to the northern parts of Brazil, but they are now used throughout South America due to popularity. As a result, you’re thankfully able to get hold of tapioca starch reasonably easily!
Tapioca starch doesn’t have much of a flavor to it on its own, it simply tastes mildly starchy, but it’s very useful for thickening out your foods.
As a result, it’s popularly used in stews, sauces, and soups, because it helps to make them much thicker and less watery.
As you’ll know by now, potato starches are also used to this end, thickening out your foods. As a result, tapioca starch is a useful substitute, achieving the same results!
Better still, tapioca starch is gluten-free just like potato starch.
5. Cornstarch
The next potato flour substitute in our list is cornstarch, one of the most useful products out there.
Cornstarch, also known as cornflour, is made from a corn kernel’s starch and comes in a powdery form. The starch is taken from the kernel’s endosperm, a process which was discovered all the way back in 1842.
Like tapioca starch and arrowroot powder, cornstarch is primarily used as a thicken agent, helping you to make sauces, stews, and soups much thicker.
This makes it ideal as a replacement for potato starches, which serves the same purpose.
On top of that, cornstarch has a pretty neutral flavor to it, so it won’t impose on the taste of any of your dishes. This can be really useful, even if potato starch does itself give your food a hint of potato-deliciousness.
If you mix cornstarch with water, you’ll get a gelatinous and thick substance that you can use in various ways.
For example, if you’re making a recipe that requires egg whites and you don’t have any, simply mix together those ingredients and use the gelatinous substance in the place of the egg whites.
6. Mashed Potato
Yes really! It may not seem like the most obvious potato flour substitute, but mashed potato can be used in some cases to get a similar result to that of using potato starch.
For example, if you want to thicken out a sauce or stew, adding mashed potato into it will work.
On the downside, though, mash potato doesn’t work quite so well when you try to use it in dough or baked goods.
7. Rice Flour
Our final potato flour substitute is rice flour. We’ve already compared it to mochiko flour previously, so it’s understandable that it also makes a good alternative to potato flour!
A regular rice flour should make your dishes light and fluffy, and it’s especially useful as a thickening agent for your sauces and soups – just like potato flour.
Final Thoughts
Potato flour is a really useful ingredient, but if you can’t get your hands on any, then these 6 substitutes will give you the same brilliant effects!
Hi, I’m Aubrey, and I have been a chef for close to 8 years. Cooking has always been a passion of mine, as long as I can remember. I loved my play kitchen when I was a kid, and would offer my parents my own (albeit gross) cookie recipes to taste!
Here at ButterandSaltGatherings, I want to offer a wide range of ingredients, flavors, meals and recipes so that you can start living each day to the fullest, and enjoy only the best food.
