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Comment by devchix | Hacker News Reader

> Webstaurant would ship a pallet of flour, 50 bags of 50lbs each, for $1,081 or $0.43/lb.

> Unfortunately, between placing the order and them shipping it they ran out of stock

Insanity! I'm heartened that people are still baking at home though. For comparison, retail King Arthur All-Purpose flour goes for about $3.69 for 5lbs, or $0.73/lb, so at $0.56/lb Sir Galahad flour is still a bargain. Whole wheat flour has bran and germ and the oil they contain make it harder to store than white flour, so I wouldn't buy a lot of it.

Flour is for more than just bread. Top of my head: tart shell, pizza dough, tortilla, thickening up sauces, can't make a roux or a bechamel without flour, fresh pasta, cookies, muffins, cakes.

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I question how many people are actually using the flour they're hoarding, and how many are just putting it in the back of the pantry because, "When the end of the world comes, you'll need flour!"

It's very irritating for those of us who actually bake on a regular basis and resisted the temptation to hoard for hoarding's sake.

I've been baking bread under quarantine when I haven't in the past been a baker on a regular basis. What it does is allow me to extend the time between grocery store visits; the usual choice is to buy less frozen food so I can store a loaf or two of bread in the freezer, instead I can fill my freezer and bake when my bread runs out.

I'm doing this quite explicitly - on my last shopping trip I bought one loaf that went straight into the breadbox. When it is gone it will be replaced by a baked loaf.

I don't know if this thinking is common, but obviously extending the time between grocery store visits is a good thing.

tangentially related: I think there's been a lot of unwarranted gleeful bashing of people as universal stockpilers when I suspect that most of this is a tempo/timing thing (which easily destroys a JIT supply chain.) It's not that most people were stockpiling unnecessarily, it's that everybody was shopping at the same time, and fully stocking their larder rather than doing it as casually as they usually would. The special cases of particular staples like toilet paper were intensely covered by the media, IMO creating the hoarding of those staples. In normal times, if I have three rolls of toilet paper at home and I'm at the grocery store, unless a sale jumps out at me I'm probably not going to buy - I only buy when I'm critically low. In current times, that would be a bad move that would result in a special trip just for TP (which would be trivial in normal times.) Not buying the largest size of TP available (which is only around $20) seems reckless under the circumstances. If I hear that people are stockpiling, I might want to buy more than one for fear that when I need TP, I might have to travel from store to store to find it, exposing myself even more.

I'm saying this as somebody who always buys the largest size unless there's a sale that makes a smaller size cheaper by sheet, went shopping a couple of weeks before any quarantines were announced, and therefore hasn't had to buy any during the pandemic. The fact that I was able to make it 5 weeks on what I had at home before going out again was a comfort.

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I've talked to most of the friends in the group buy about their baking; it just comes up. People are making bread, pizza, naan, waffles, all sorts of things. I don't think this is people buying flour who aren't going to bake with it.

Around 50% of US meals are in commercial kitchens, be that schools or restaurants. The massive change in commercial to retail sales is going to cause far more issues than hoarders.

I present to you this commenter, who just bought 200 lbs of flour.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22885192

Hoarders suck, especially super hoarders like this.

> I do go through a lot of it. My hobby is baking.

Please don't reflexively characterize people who do different things or have different needs as "super hoarders".

If you're willing to dismiss 200 lbs of flour as hobby levels, then do you even believe in hoarding at all?

We're talking enough flour to make 200 loaves. At best, they bought a 3 month supply of flour (and that is baking 2 loaves every day). At worst, this is more flour than they can possibly use, and a large amount of it will go bad (storing 200 lbs of flour inside is a bit of a challenge, so it may be stored in a garage or worse).

And of course, with every product in the grocery store, if we all go out and buy a 3 month or further supply of a basic good, there's not going to be any left. Which only encourages more hoarding.

I don't know about willing to dismiss but you're making assumptions about facts not in evidence. For all you know the poster is cooking for 6 adults.

Moreover, ... whats wrong with a three months supply of flour? For the last few years we've maintained that much flour at my house-- just because its a convenient level to purchase/manage for us, nothing to do with preparedness (which, incidentally, is virtuous), and certainly not any kind of hording.

I totally agree with you. The more people that maintain a 3m supply of non-perishables and rotate through them, the more robust society will be to problems like this one.

Households also vary a lot in size: ours is six adults and two kids, so we do go through a lot of food.

Or they intend to bake and when their first try at a sourdough starter fails they give up, in part because at least around where I live there's no shortage of bread (and there hasn't been) in the stores.

> there's no shortage of bread (and there hasn't been) in the stores.

Bread, especially good bread, gets stale kind of quickly. If you want fresh bread right now and don't want to continually go out an expose yourself to infection the only real option is to make it at home.

You can slice it and freeze it. Even when I make it myself, I don't go through enough bread (and don't want to) to make it more than once a week or so. So, in my case, it's definitely not about baking fresh bread every day or two.

ha very true! I think this true for all types of hoarding, doesn't matter what the thing/product is. It is just problem of hoarding.

waffles are the perfect comfort food during these times- 2c flour, 1.75c milk, 1/2c melted butter or oil, big pinch of salt, 4tsp baking powder, 2 eggs. Throw in some vanilla or other flavor concentrate if you'd like!

A quick crowd pleasing recipe using all staples

Waffles are so simple. Obviously, they require a waffle iron, but apart from that I can quickly mix up a bunch of ingredients I always have at hand in a single bowl with a pour spout, using a single fork to stir it, a plastic IKEA cup for measuring ingredients (exactly 1 cup), and a 1tsp measuring spoon. I try to use "standard" dishes whenever possible because they're so much easier to clean (stack neatly in the sink and easily loaded into the dishwasher). Specialised tools like whisks just aggravate me.

And so delicious!

FWIW whisks to me are basic kitchen equipment, anything but specialized.

To me specialized would be something like an "avocado cutter" or a "poached egg cooker", etc. Or a waffle iron ;)

Absolutely. I'm still using the same balloon whisk I bought almost 30 years ago during my "no power tools in the kitchen" phase.

See my reply to your comment's sibling.

Ok; I guess you can fork with a whisk ... you can't really whisk with a fork!

You can sometimes whisk with a fork but it's a lot of work.

It’s a bit like cutting with a spoon.

I, too, am annoyed by special purpose tools and gadgets in the kitchen. It's for that reason that I'll point out that whisks are far from special purpose, especially in comparison to a waffle iron.

Yeah, but if I'm making waffles, the waffle iron isn't optional. The whisk is.

And by "specialised", I don't mean uncommon, I mean anything other than a basic spoon, fork, bowl, plate, or knife. A whisk has a very specific, specialised purpose, and I'll use one if I need to (such as when baking a cake), but a fork does just as good a job in the same amount of time for the waffles I make.

The reason for this is I hate dealing with all these one-offs when loading and unloading the dishwasher. One more bowl or spoon doesn't add any time if there's 20 other identical ones anyway, but every specialised tool like a whisk or a dedicated measuring cup adds disproportionate complexity to the process.

It's also why I dump all the spoons, forks, etc. into separate compartments (handles up) in the silverware holder in the dishwasher. Putting them all back in the drawer is a single step, but takes only a few more seconds when loading it.

Thanks for this. I am going to try your recipe.

Few months back we bought Waffle maker with great expectations. However after 2 disastrous attempts which resulted in very stogy waffles, we put that away. I was wondering should if we just buy some readymade batter that some stores sell.

Real waffles use yeast, sadly another item that's becoming scarce. Here's the Cook's Illustrated recipe which I use very often, it turns out excellent waffles.

1 3/4 C milk

1 stick butter (melted but not hot)

2 C flour

1 T sugar

1 t salt

1 1/2 t yeast

2 eggs

1 t vanilla extract

Whisk everything together in a lidded container. Stick in fridge overnight (10 hrs min, 24 hrs max). It'll be thick and bubbly in the morning, ladle it in your hot waffle iron, don't whisk it down, it'll deflate the gas. Makes 7 - 8 waffles.

if you have flour you can have yeast in the form of sourdough starter. I make my waffles with my pre-feeding castoff occasionally.

I still see yeast online with reasonable shipping time: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HST626C/

Waffle makers also produce phenomenal cornbread (or cornwaffles) in minutes.

Otherwise it's an appliance that doesn't get much use around lunch/dinner time.

Brush waffle iron with oil, place a handful of tater tots inside, and close to cook.

I'll happily eat cornbread at any meal

I'm not a big believer in prepackaged mixes of cakes/etc., but Krusteaz Belgian Waffle mix is da bomb. Good enough that I don't bother making waffles from scratch unless i'm out.

also put sugar in, amount to taste!

Store brand flour though is only $0.40 / lb (5 lb bag @ $2) so this really only makes sense of you can't obtain flour another way. Once you add in labor of splitting it up and billing everyone it seems like too much effort. Fwiw, it seems like the bread supply recovered very quickly.

Yes, this is much more hassle than just buying flour at the store, but in our experience right now that's not an option.

Sometimes stores just keep selling when out of stock to collect your email address. Especially likely if they only authorized his card instead of fully capturing the charge.

Also, just because a flour is labeled high-gluten doesn't necessarily mean that it actually has more gluten than all-purpose flour. It varies by company and country. A percent in either direction isn't going to affect much. Even though cake flour has about half the gluten of all-purpose, you can still make noodles out of it.

You certainly can make noodles with cake flour, but I think decent noodles need at least 50% durum flour even when you're using eggs.

Pancakes!

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