I have been recently trying Bob's Red Mill whole grain brown rice flour and when I came across this comment/response I wondered how can we know if our brown rice flour is starting to go rancid? I recently made a loaf of bread with some brown rice flour that I had purchased a couple of weeks earlier (I did not refrigerate it either) and the third day of the baked loaf my engineer husband noticed some white in the bread and mentioned he didn't think the batter got mixed well enough. I don't think that's possible because I used a KitchenAid and mixed for 10 minutes! That leads me to a second question. You only recommend 3 minutes for mixing your dough. Is there such a thing as overmixing? I have found that I get a product with smaller air pockets when I mix for 10 minutes with the recipes I have used so far. Does it depend on the mix of fours you use? Robin, you can taste rancidity in flour - a rancid flour will smell "old," and/or you can taste it as bitterness on the back of your tongue. The way I tell if a whole-grain flour is rancid is simply to take a pinch, and put it on my tongue; if it tastes "sweet," (i.e., no bitterness) after 5 to 10 seconds, it's fine. If you get that bitter bite on your tongue, it's going rancid. (It's not going to hurt you, by the way; it just tastes bad.) Second question: I don't believe you can over-mix your gluten-free dough. But I'm very new at this. If you're having success by mixing for 10 minutes, stick with it - it's obviously working for you. PJH

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