A few months ago, Zachary Golper, the chef and an owner of Bien Cuit bakery in Brooklyn, gave me his recipe for rice flour poundcake. The rice flour, he said, would make the cake light, silky and very tender, while the combination of coconut oil and butter would give it a gentle flavor that was less overtly rich than the usual all-butter versions.
Never one to hesitate when it comes to baking a cake, I made it as soon I could. Back then, when I could just pop into any store anytime I wanted, finding the ingredients was easy. Rice flour was available in Asian markets and in the gluten-free section of large supermarkets, and there was plenty of it.
The cake was every bit as good as Mr. Golper promised: with a tight-knit, melt-in-the-mouth crumb, and a delicate flavor spiked with a little black pepper and some mezcal.
It was certainly one of the best poundcakes I’d ever made, and it was gluten-free. But I didn’t feel any rush to publish it. I filed it away as one of those evergreen recipes I could call on when I needed it. Maybe in summer, I thought, when people could pair it with berries.
Then, everything changed. Suddenly, all-purpose flour became as scarce as hand sanitizer, and rice flour became an excellent and unusual option.
[For more recipes from Melissa Clark, see her new column, From the Pantry.]
When Mr. Golper developed the recipe, he used white rice flour that was milled in Japan, where, he said, they have a different grinding technology that produces a consistently fine particle size.
When I first made it, I used some of his Japanese flour, and it was divine. But since then, I’ve made it with non-Japanese rice flour, and it was nearly as good, maybe ever so slightly less satiny on the tongue. (Full disclosure: My husband and daughter didn’t notice a difference.)
But perhaps the best part about this cake recipe, in this particular moment, is that if you don’t have rice flour, Mr. Golper said, you could use white rice.
“Just throw some into a coffee grinder, and you’ve got rice flour,” he said. “I mean it’s definitely class C rice flour, but it will work,” he said. (Class C refers to a lower-quality flour.)
Which means, even if the supermarket baking aisle shelves continue to offer up slim pickings — cassava flour, anyone? — if you have rice, you can make cake. And a very good cake, indeed.
Recipe: Rice Flour Poundcake
