<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

well kids
thank you as usual for your responses and input..always appreciated
i didnt get a whole lot of info on this one....tho there were many who wanted
as much as i could find out and alos had some good suggestions..so here it is

*I just did a Google search on lotus flour and came up with a ton of menus
from
American-Chinese
restaurants. Seems it is widely used to batter Chinese food for deep frying
and the few
comments there
are say it produces a light, mild, crispy batter.  This may however reflect
only one or
two Chinese
traditions (Cantonese, Szechuan).

There's a short informative essay at:http://www.specialfoods.com/lotus.html
and references
to it as a
wheat alternate at http://www.foodsubs.com/ThickenStarch.html and
http://www.food-
allergy.org/cooking2.html.

At http://chinesefood.about.com/library/weekly/aa042399.htm it is said to be
like
cornstarch, which
would explain why it doesn't turn up much - if you can get a less expensive
stuff that is
more or less
equivalent, why go for an exotic flour?

There's a book on "ethnic ingredients" (guess that means "everyone is ethnic
except me")
described at
http://www.housebarra.com/EP/ep04/07bookreviews.html that apparently refers
to it.

Dr Grisanti's site at http://www.drgrisanti.com/wheatfree.htm lists one place
that sells
it online (Special
Foods) but I bet you could find it in any well stocked Chinese grocery store
in a city
with a Chinatown
(Toronto, NY, SF, LA, etc etc) and also recipes in a good Chinese cookbook.

There's a reference, but no recipe, to feng kuo made with this flour at
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/535464.  This looks like a dumpling/pasta-like
use.

You could of course buy a bag, then take it into a large, good quality
traditional Chinese
restaurant and
ask the cook(pick a quiet time, of course) to tell you more about it. I've
had very good
luck doing this.

< www.specialfoods.com/identifying.html  seems to be the only source anyone
found online..personally i thought their prices were a bit outrageous...way
out of my range...i did find it in my asian market the other night but the
packages were opened and buggy so i didnt buy any...is like to try making
pasta with it as i saw a reference to it being used that way but could not
find a recipe anywhere..on google or anywhere else...if i try it and i works
ill let you all know

<<There's a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant on the Upper West Side where lotus
flour is apparently used on the crispy whole fish....>>

im assuming the above is in NEW YORK city...
in any case the best i could find out myself was the same as above..mostly in
chinese cuisine its used for coating other foods before frying...and if you
do read the stuff on the special foods site you will see that it is supposed
to be very healty for you...i tired to email them to ask how they suggest it
be used but the mail was returned to me saying it was not a known
address.....???
sorry i couldnt get more for all of you
have a good week
donna in ny

*Support summarization of posts, reply to the SENDER not the CELIAC List*