Rice Flour in Asian Cooking

From cheung fun to black sesame tang yuan to mochi, rice flour gives these dishes a soft and/or chewy texture. Even though these foods use some sort of rice flour, it would be a mistake to think all varieties are alike and can be used interchangeably. As a matter of fact, when people send me questions about why a recipe that uses rice flour went wrong, incorrect flour choice is often the culprit. 

The differences between these flours are difficult to detect with the naked eye. But once you learn more about how these flours are labeled and the differences between the milling process (i.e., wet milling vs dry milling), you’ll be better equipped to use rice flours with confidence.

THAI RICE FLOUR VS GLUTINOUS RICE FLOUR

Many Chinese recipes typically use wet-milled regular rice flour or glutinous rice flour. Back in China, my mom ground soaked rice with a stone mill to make a batter for various steamed dishes, like cheung fun (rice noodle rolls). Nowadays, she buys rice flour produced in Thailand, usually the Erawan brand. 

Packages of Thai rice flour and glutinous rice flour look very similar, so it’s easy to mix them up if you don’t pay attention to the writing on the label. Remember this rule: red label = regular rice flour; green label = glutinous rice flour. Now that we know which color label goes with which type of flour, let’s go over how these flours generate different textures in dishes.

RICE FLOUR: THE WORKHORSE

Many steamed dim sum dishes, use regular rice flour (it’s called 粘米粉 or 大米粉 in Chinese; affiliate link). Regular rice flour is made from long-grain white rice, which has a high percentage of a starch called amylose. Amylose gives rice a light and fluffy texture. When you use regular rice flour in a recipe, it gives the food a soft texture that’s not overly sticky. (Confusingly, the word 粘 means viscous or sticky in Chinese. Just don’t think about the Chinese meaning when using this variety of flour.)

Besides cheung fun, you can use rice flour to make turnip cake (lo bak go) or taro cake. Plain rice cakes that you use for stir frying or tteokbokki are also made with regular rice flour. Remember: regular rice flour comes in the package with the red label. 

GLUTINOUS RICE FLOUR: FOR CHEWY TEXTURE

For dishes where the food is incredibly chewy and stretchy, such as tang yuan (glutinous rice balls), use glutinous rice flour (affiliate link). In Chinese, glutinous rice flour is called 糯米粉. This type of flour is made with long-grain glutinous rice (or sticky rice), which contains the starch amylopectin. Amylopectin makes the grains of rice sticky once cooked. That’s why dough made with glutinous rice flour will have a similar sticky quality. It’s also this sticky quality that allows the cooked food to be stretchy and chewy. 

Dishes like black sesame tang yuan and sweet rice cakes with red bean paste filling are made using glutinous rice flour. Remember: for gooey, chewy foods, use glutinous rice flour in the green label. 

By the way, although the word “glutinous” is spelled similarly as “gluten,” the two words do not share the same meaning. In other words, glutinous rice flour does not contain gluten. The word “glutinous” merely refers to the sticky quality of the rice that’s used to produce the flour.

WET-MILLED VS DRY-MILLED RICE FLOURS

You may wonder at this point why my mom uses flours produced in Thailand instead of supermarket brands like Bob’s Red Mill. The answer lies in how the flours are produced. Thai rice flours are wet milled, meaning rice is soaked in water before it’s ground into a flour. (The Chinese characters “水磨” on the Erawan bags of flour mean “water milled.”) This process of soaking the rice first before grinding yields flour that’s finer and softer to touch. When you use this fine flour in a recipe, the food takes on a more tender texture. 

Another method of producing rice flour is through dry milling. Here, grains of rice are not soaked before grinding and the resulting flour feels coarser to touch. Mochiko (Japanese sweet rice flour) and Bob’s Red Mill’s white rice flour are examples of dry-milled rice flours. (By the way, I’ve borrowed the terms “wet milling” and “dry milling” from Andrea Nguyen’s article.)

Typically, I don’t use dry-milled rice flours in Chinese recipes. The coarser texture of the flour isn’t quite right in steamed cakes like turnip cake. Besides the texture, there’s a significant difference in weight between wet-milled and dry-milled flours, making 1-for-1 substitutions difficult. 

In the photo above, I used the spoon-and-sweet method to measure 1 cup of wet-milled rice flour (left) and 1 cup of dry-milled flour (right). The wet-milled flour weighed 105 grams, while the dry-milled flour weighed 150 grams! So when you are cooking a Chinese recipe, go for wet-milled rice flours, as that is the variety that most recipe writers use. 

MOCHIKO VS GLUTINOUS RICE FLOUR

Mochiko is a dry-milled, Japanese-style sweet rice flour made from mochigome (もち米, see photo above). Mochigome is a short grain variety of sticky rice (it’s also known as sweet rice, which is why mochiko is often labeled as a “sweet rice flour”). Like long-grain glutinous rice, mochigome turns sticky once cooked. Therefore, foods made with mochiko, such as mochi or baked mochi will have similar chewy and stretchy quality as foods made with glutinous rice flour.

Because mochiko and glutinous rice flour are both used to make dishes with similar textures, people ask me if they can be interchangeable. The answer is complicated, and it has to do with how each type of flour is milled. 

Glutinous rice flour, being wet-milled, has a very soft and fine texture, while mochiko is coarser because it is dry milled. When I tried using mochiko instead of the usual glutinous rice flour to make tang yuan, I noticed that the dough felt much more firm and dense. Even after I cooked the balls of dough made with mochiko, the texture wasn’t quite right either. 

Then I tried using glutinous rice flour in a mochi waffle recipe, when I’d normally use mochiko. With glutinous rice flour, I noticed that the batter was much more runny than the batter made with mochiko. The texture of the cooked waffles were similar. The slight difference was that ones made with glutinous rice flour were a bit softer and stretchier.

In conclusion, I wouldn’t use these two flours interchangeably, unless a recipe specifies exactly how to do so.

A NOTE ABOUT BROWN RICE FLOUR

Traditionally, Asian dishes don’t use brown rice flour. Since this type of flour contains all parts of the grain of rice (bran, germ, and endosperm), the flour will give food a denser texture. This won’t be suitable for most steamed Asian recipes. However, brown rice flour gives the right kind of structure needed in gluten-free baking. The dough in my gluten-free heirloom tomato galette uses a mixture of dry-milled brown rice and white rice flours. 

I hope this rice flour guide is useful in helping you understand the differences between the various flours!