Affordably Gluten-Free: Our Search for Sorghum

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• Sumo

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Last fall I was diagnosed with celiac disease, which means I can never eat gluten (that is wheat, barley, rye, or anything made with them).  At the time, I was too ill to do anything about my diet, but fortunately my oldest daughter did the research and got me started on a gluten-free lifestyle.  What a blessing that was!

However, it wasn’t long before we realized that with 7 cooks in our home it was inevitable to get crumbs, dustings of flour, or drops of pasta water into my gluten-free meals.  Therefore our home is now a gluten-free zone.  As a result, my health has been improving, bit by bit, but feeding an entire family gluten-free food is a bit of a strain on the budget.

You see, alternative flours are packaged in tiny packages at outrageous sums.  Just two years ago we could get a 10kg (22lb) bag of wheat flour for under $4 on sale.  Now I’m spending $4.79 for one pound of sorghum flour!  That’s over $1.50 per cup of flour!  The ingredient cost is just the tip of the iceberg; if we didn’t do all our baking from scratch, we’d be spending $7.00 for a loaf of gluten-free bread which, by all accounts, is horrible.

So I began researching sorghum.  We tried growing our own and the plants are now huge, as tall as our barn roof.   It turns out that another name for sorghum is broom corn, so we may be making brooms as well as harvesting the seeds. That could be fun, but we can’t eat brooms, and there is not enough sorghum seed to meet our requirements. 

When we called around for a cheaper source of the flour, we discovered that only the tiny expensive packages were gluten-free.  All the rest had some wheat contamination from being milled in a regular flour mill. 

Well, then, how about buying the grain rather than the flour?  That was the next obvious thing to try.  One well-stocked coop in our province said they could find no source of sorghum grain, so I almost gave up.  If they couldn’t find it, who could?  But we kept on looking and God blessed our efforts.  We now have 45 pounds of sorghum grain in a plastic bin in our basement, bought for only $40 (a savings of $175 over the cost of the equivalent amount of flour).

We plan to mill it using a little coffee mill.  If that doesn’t work, we’ll try the Sue Gregg soaking and blending method  of baking with grain.  Hopefully we won’t need to buy a real grain mill, but if we do, we’ll save bundles on our rice and bean flours as well. 

This post has been entered in Canada Girl’s Tightwad Tuesday and in Being Frugal’s Tightwad Tuesday.