First of all, flour has come to mean nearly one thing in this culture: all-purpose bleached wheat flour. Sometimes when friends eat a slice of something I have baked--a chocolate-sour cream bundt cake tonight, for example--they look up in amazement. "How did you make this without flour?"
"I didn't," I say. "It's not flourless. It just doesn't have any wheat flour in it."
Flour, after all, merely means a powder that has been ground from something whole. We can use sorghum flour (a whole grain), tapioca flour (a starch), almond flour (a nut), garbanzo flour (a bean), or sunflower flour (a seed). Wheat isn't the only flour in town anymore.
So sweet rice flour is a flour. We can all agree on that.
However, there's more.
Is sweet rice flour sweet? Nope. It's pretty neutral in taste. If anything, it tastes a tiny bit milky. Often, it's used to make desserts such as mochi, so perhaps that's why it was tagged with "sweet." Or maybe it's from the faint tiny sweetness that milk has on the tongue. However, it's really not sweet.
Even more confusing is that it's often known as "glutinous" rice flour. Does that mean it contains gluten? No. Glutinous simply means sticky, super starchy. Think glue. This flour might bind like glue but it does not contain gluten.
Those of us who have to eat gluten-free need to know this, since sweet rice flour is one of the best flours at our disposal for gluten-free baking.
Think of it this way. Rice flour is most often made from long-grain rice. What's the property of a basmati or jasmine rice? Why do we want it on our plates? We love the fluffiness. Each individual grain of rice is separate from the other grains. When you're making chicken and rice for dinner, you don't want a mound of rice grains stuck together next to your roast chicken. You want a pile of fluffiness.
However, when you're baking gluten-free, you want that stuck-together quality.
Think of sushi rice. Sweet rice is not sushi rice, but they are akin to each other. A piece of fresh salmon on top of a pile of basmati rice wouldn't work. It would fall apart. Now, think of the qualities of sushi rice. Sticky. It holds together. You can form a shape and have it stay.
When you're baking, and you don't have a gluten flour in your arsenal, you want sweet rice flour in your cupboard. Because this flour has a higher starch content than other flours, it binds baked goods together. In all the combinations of flour mixes I play with, I always have sweet rice flour in the mix.
And if you're making a sauce like bechamel or a roux without all-purpose wheat flour, try sweet rice flour. It thickens liquids beautifully and works like a charm.
Along with all this? It's pretty darned cheap.
Confusion--go away. We need this flour in our kitchens now.