The Secret to Great Gluten-Free Gravy Is Sticky Rice Flour

To figure out how to make the best gluten-free gravy, I tested five different wheat-free flour options.
Gluten free gravy being served on mashed potatoes.
Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Rebecca Jurkevich

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Dining with someone this holiday season whose dietary needs are different from your own? Sure, we all are. Me? My sister-in-law is vegetarian, my brother-in-law doesn’t eat pork, and my partner has developed certain adult-onset seafood allergies. But I don’t let these things undermine my dinner. Delicious food isn’t off the menu just because certain ingredients you love (or used to love, or your cousin Millie can’t eat) are off the table.

So when I was tasked with figuring out how to make the very best gluten-free gravy, I didn’t balk. There’s no telling when I’ll have to make a batch for my own gatherings. The thing is: Gluten-free all-purpose flour works so well in so many applications these days that I thought that this would be a one-and-done, that’s-that, pour-some-gravy-on-me kind of experiment. And it would have been but for curiosity. Turns out, while you can make gravy (for Thanksgiving, a biscuit breakfast, or any other reason you like) with GFAP, it’s not the best gluten-free gravy you can make.

No wheat was harmed in the making of this gravy.

Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Rebecca Jurkevich

I began testing my gluten-free contenders using a pretty basic—but totally flavorful—turkey gravy recipe accented with white wine, miso, and vinegar. I wanted a method that would satisfy cooks who’ve been cooking gluten-free for years, as well as anyone who may have adjusted their diet more recently. I also decided that the final recipe should taste as good and be as simple to make as gravy thickened with wheat flour so that any cook, regardless of their own dietary status, could make a single boat of gravy to accommodate every diner at their Thanksgiving table.

This left ingredients like cornstarch, tapioca, and potato starch off the table. In a traditional roux for turkey gravy, the fat and flour are cooked in a pan until the flour is well toasted, lending the finished gravy a ton of warm, savory flavor. Starches don’t work that way. Try to toast them and they’ll simply burn. Instead, I gathered a few favorite gluten-free flours and made the same recipe with each. A few required more stock (or less flour) to reach the right consistency and, truthfully, you can make a delicious gravy with any of them. But the one that really captured my attention was the gravy made with glutinous rice flour (a.k.a. sticky rice flour or sweet rice flour). Before I get into why, a rundown on the trials:

Sweet Rice Flour

Gluten-free all-purpose flour

The ultimate downfall of any gravy is that it will often congeal as it begins to cool off. The common wisdom is that you should always simmer your gravy until it’s just slightly thinner than the way you’d ideally like to serve it. But when I made my turkey gravy with a 1:1 style of GFAP, things got very viscous very quickly. The reason: 1:1 style flours include xanthan gum, which provides the elasticity required to make it perform like wheat flour in baked goods. But gravy is a different story.

Right off the stove this version was as delicious as any other gravy, but within just a few minutes on the table, it thickened in a pretty unappetizing way. If this happens to you, it’s easy enough to whisk in a little extra warm stock, but it’s not the ideal situation when you’ve got other things (hosting, rewarming the stuffing) on your mind.

Buckwheat flour

Buckwheat flour, hands down, made the most flavorful gravy I tested. It’s truly delicious: earthy, nutty, grassy. Really robust. But that’s also kind of the problem. While I will absolutely make buckwheat flour gravy again to pair with biscuits (even if the biscuits themselves aren’t gluten-free), I’m not sure it belongs on the Thanksgiving table. This gravy was on the grainy side—a bit rustic for a holiday dinner. I also think this gravy’s greatest asset is also its greatest weakness: The gravy is delicious, but it threatens to overpower your Thanksgiving plate.

Chickpea flour

Chickpea flour also made a flavorful gravy, but it too didn’t feel totally right for Thanksgiving. It was hale and hearty, a little domineering with an earthy flavor that, perhaps not surprisingly, tastes of beans. Of all the flours I tried, it was also the one that required the most tinkering with ratios to get right, requiring about three cups more liquid per batch than any of the other flours I tried. I believe that a roux made with chickpea flour would really shine as a thickener for gluten-free stews, where that bean-forward flavor may fit right in. But I’m not making stew this Thanksgiving.

White rice flour

The gravy made from white rice flour felt almost right, but it retained a bit of grittiness and, like the 1:1 flour before it, also turned gloppy rather quickly once it started to cool off. It was, in a word, fine, and would probably be the best substitute if you can’t find sticky rice flour—though I’d recommend straining the finished gravy through a fine-mesh sieve to smooth it out.

Glutinous rice flour

You've tasted glutinous rice flour (which does not contain gluten, despite similarities between the words) if you’ve ever had Japanese mochi, Hawaiian butter mochi, or tang yuan. This flour is made from ground sticky rice—it’s also sometimes labeled as “sweet rice flour.” The flour isn’t actually sweet, but it is frequently used in desserts, hence the name.

The same properties that give mochi its signature bounciness are what turn out such an appealing gravy. Sweet rice flour has a high ratio of amylopectin (one of the elements that make up starch), which lends body to baked goods and sauces. The gravy I made with glutinous rice flour was captial-V velvety. Without being too thick, it held some weight on the plate, clinging to slices of turkey breast and cascading in ribbons—not waterfalls and not mudslides—down mounds of mashed potato. I can’t say for sure why it didn’t congeal as quickly as plain rice flour did, but I can say that it reheated like a dream the next day, when I used the leftovers as a base for soup. Sticky rice flour is an ingredient I’ve kept on hand to make a certain cake for a few years. Good to know it’s ready for the gravy train the next time a gluten-free guest walks through my door.