I recently tried to thicken a sauce using soy flour - to little or no perceivable effect.
Therefore i’m wondering if you all have any pearls of wisdom for using these ‘alternative’ flours?
I tend to cook ‘by feeling’ - and i miss knowing how to substitute one flour for another when playing with recipes, so any advice would be fabulous!
I mean, can i add something to a recipe with one of the flours and suddenly it works? Do you have a ‘go to’ flour as a preference?
For example:
Coconut flour - adds a slight sweetness to food i’ve been told. I see it in bread recipes etc, but i’m guessing i can’t just use it like normal flour - or is there a trick to it?
Chick pea flour - i own a packet of this now, but I don’t know what to do with it
Soy flour - again, not much clue
Lupin flour - found this in a health food shop - apparently it’s great, but can i just throw it in instead of normal flour, or one of the other flours?
Nut meals - almond, hazelnut - i guess these make things quite dense?
Bran- this works for ‘beefing out’ cracker dough etc - although it does have a strong taste
Flax/ chia - i use these a lot already to thicken/ bind recipes instead of using so many eggs (cauliflower pizza bases for example)
Psyllium husk - also seems to be used for binding, but can give a ‘bread’ feeling to things made with cream cheese and eggs - like oopsies (http://www.food.com/recipe/oopsie-bread-497736) - although they still taste too ‘eggy’ for me - hardly surprising, that is pretty much all they are.
I do experiment, but i have had a few catastrophes that i would prefer to avoid in the future, so any help gratefully accepted 
Have you tried googling these flours for help with using them?
There are TONS of recipes out there for alternative flours. The basic answer to your question is that none of them will do exactly what traditional wheat flour does - and you can’t just substitute them in regular recipes. I recommend looking up a recipe you want to make + “grain free.” A lot of the recipes that pop up will be for these alternative flours. I use coconut flour and almond flour the most.
Tapioca flour is great for thickening sauces.
For baking, I use a blend of brown rice flour, tapioca flour, almond meal, and coconut flour. In all baking, I reduce the flour component by half using usweetened coconut and increasing eggs by one or two. I add a small amount of xanthum gum for cookies to make them chewy 
Thanks for the “+grain free” and the xanthan gum tip - i had never thought of simply putting “grain free” - silly of me really! - and xanthan gum is something i shall look into!