So much flour will sit in people’s pantry and go bad, never opened.
Each bag was around $30. With shipping and handling, the grand total came to around $200 total.
I've already made 6 pizzas, 8 loaves of sourdough bread, 3 cakes, and 4 batches of cookies. I've been baking about two new loaves of sourdough every week.
When you consider that a single pizza order for delivery typically costs around $30 after tip and your typical artisanal bread loaf at the store is around $5, my flour has already paid for itself, and I still have months of flour left (assuming I keep baking 2 loaves every week).
I would agree with you, though. Many people probably aren't actually using their flour and baking goods they have been hoarding (beyond making a couple of things).
For me, though, baking has essentially turned into my hobby.
$200 to fund an entire hobby that will keep me entertained (and and my little family fed) for months? Not the worst $200 I have spent, that's for sure.
A key thing people don’t seem to mention is having an oven that can get up to a high temperature 260° C seems to be the goal.
180°C seems to be as high as the oven I inherited in my flat will go.
However, think of the OCD crew that are normally the only ones buying hand sanitizer. Us flour buyers can improvise with store bread but the OCD people must have had it hard when their essentials of hand sanitizer and toilet paper vanished from the aisles.
This is like having backups and disaster recovery in IT. You spend resources on it, but get nothing in return. That one time things do go wrong though it can literally save your business and you'll be happy to have had backups and recovery in place.
I think that people's fears of a lack of food in first world countries are overblown, but people are still afraid.
So let's say things have collapsed to the point that all the bakeries or supply chains leading to you are now out of commission. It's time to bake bread and you have flour. Do you have yeast and other ingredients already? They're already in shortages too. Is your water service and electricity / gas still working? Do you have experience baking bread, or access to a recipe book, or is your Internet service provider still operating? Okay - let's say the bread supply has collapsed completely and all of these things are still working out for you - great - you can bake some bread! But honestly, even that's pretty lucky. You might be eating cold gruel with water from the creek, if you even know that's a thing.
But wait! There's more! All the supply chains near you have just collapsed. Everyone's going hungry once they've gone through their 2 (or 0) bags of flour. Is your house about to be looted? Can you secure it? Are the phones and police dispatch still working? Do you have anything else to eat with your week's supply of bread? Are you even emotionally prepared for what life is like now if things are getting this bad and you just now decided to have some extra flour on hand? Wait - is that a fever and non-productive cough you're starting to feel? What are you wiping your ass with!?
If all you have in mind is last-minute hoarding of a few staples, you're contributing to a wider short-term problem and your staples won't keep you sane and healthy very long. If you're bored in quarantine, now's a good time to start planning to be more prepared and self-sufficient for the next event.
Cinnamon is also not the best suggestion- there is a very good reason spices were considered a luxury, as they aren't truly necessary and rely on being transported long distances.
Baking powder is a reasonable suggestion, as it stores essentially indefinitely. Making it is theoretically possible, but it isn't a project I'd recommend for an inexperienced chemist. Although if things are at that point, bread likely won't be your highest priority.
Sourdough would be a viable suggestion, there is a reason the miners in the Yukon gold rush used it. It can be made with ingredients that can be locally sourced/grown nearly anywhere. However, it does rely on refrigeration.
Truly thing you can make quick breads pretty easily and without any work at all and the goods for it will last ages. Even flour.
Actually, the modern freezer will keep you safe and secure for ages.
All you need is electricity and you can outlast any temporary supply chain stall with this stuff. People buying flour are perfectly fine.
It's okay to be annoyed that people are making it hard to practise your hobby. Just sounds silly when folks try to make it out to be some irrational thing that other people are trying things.
To be fair, I was coming from the viewpoint of not being able to find things long-term and using what you can grow and source locally, but that isnt practical for people who live in cities.
> Do you have yeast and other ingredients already?
Yup.
> Is your water service and electricity / gas still working?
We've got two camping jugs full of water that we keep full (20 gal each?) and change the water out of at least every 6 months. In the summer they're drinking water for the cabin, in the winter they're for emergencies.
I've got a 3kW generator that I use for field work, and a 30L jug of fresh gas. It gets used in the field all summer and tucked away in the winter.
> Do you have experience baking bread?
It's fun!
> Or access to a recipe book?
Stored locally on my computer, and the favourite recipes are written on recipe cards because I'm scared to get water in my laptop or iPad in the kitchen :)
> or is your Internet service provider still operating?
That's probably the trickiest of all of them. If both the cell network and the coax network go down here, we've lost communication other than the short-range 2m ham kit (also a hobby)
> You might be eating cold gruel with water from the creek, if you even know that's a thing.
For the first while, at least it's going to be hot gruel. My portable hiking stove and pot are nearby along with the sleeping bags and tent. Because I like camping :). I am going to go look up a gruel recipe here though!
> But wait! There's more! All the supply chains near you have just collapsed. Everyone's going hungry once they've gone through their 2 (or 0) bags of flour. Is your house about to be looted? Can you secure it?
Secure it permanently? No, probably not. Secure it well enough that looters would go elsewhere for the time being? Yup. At that point we'd be packing up to get out of dodge and head to the cabin or farm.
> Are the phones and police dispatch still working?
That definitely seems like a weak link. Around here there's been a huge push to move all of the existing copper landlines to fibre or coax, with battery backups in peoples' houses.
> Do you have anything else to eat with your week's supply of bread?
Kraft Dinner, canned chilli, and a bunch of home-canned vegetables (it's fun!).
Longer term, it's going to depend quite a bit on what time of the year it is. There's a root cellar at the family farm that is full at the end of harvest, and there's fresh veggies all summer. I've got about 80 rounds of .308 (I hunt, it's fun!) for big game, about 100 12ga birdshot rounds, and about a bazillion rounds of .22LR for smaller game. Father-in-law has a grain bin full of lentils I think, although I don't know if there's any specific processing that needs to happen between harvest and "ready to eat".
> Are you even emotionally prepared for what life is like now if things are getting this bad and you just now decided to have some extra flour on hand?
That's... hard to tell. In this scenario with riots and looting, we know where we'd run to, and I think we'd be fine for a while when we get there, but I'm not sure either of us are ruthless enough to actually make it there if shit is really bad.
> Wait - is that a fever and non-productive cough you're starting to feel?
That's definitely a wildcard in all of it too. The area around our "out of town" spot does have a small primary care clinic, but no intensive care facilities. Might be able to find compressed oxygen and a nasal cannula, but need a ventilator? GL;HF.
> What are you wiping your ass with!?
Old socks :D. More seriously though... I should pick up a jug of lye crystals next time I'm at the hardware store. Making soap from scratch is fun too! (although I'd rather make it from pre-extracted vegetable oil and lye crystals than rendered animal fat and lye extracted from wood ash)
"because I'm scared to get water in my laptop or iPad in the kitchen"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ0_HDJkatY
They were pretty affordable on eBay when I last checked. :)
I thought the whole rugged laptop thing was a bit hokey for a while, and then I watched a local telco guy set his Toughbook down to tie his boot. He forgot to pick it back up and backed over it with his van. Jumped out, terrified. Opened it up and you could just watch the tension release as it woke up from sleep and worked fine.
And just in case you think I'm a terrible person for sitting back and watching... I was trying to get to him, but he didn't hear me yell and backed up before I got to him :)
...but what you don't hear is all the annoying stuff. At least the old ones had super lame BIOS functionality, perhaps intended for a corporate environment where allowing the user to boot from USB (and this reinstall their OS) was actually a bad thing. The keyboards range from "mediocre" to "godawful". They're at least a generation behind in pretty much everything, and about 4 generations behind in max RAM capacity, for some reason. Since RAM tends to bottleneck my usage long before CPU, that means they become irrelevant a lot sooner than a Thinkpad with the same CPU, for instance.
And of course, the metal shell means that RF is tricky. They do all sorts of tricks to get the wifi signal out, with antennas inside plastic pods on the sides and stuff, but it's always a game of compromises.
Know that going in, and you can be very happy with a used Toughbook. I would have to be spending someone else's money to buy a new one.
Thanks for the heads up! I’m not sure what we’ll settle on exactly yet, but it’s not going to be my personal laptop that I’m bringing out into farmers’ fields this year!
I'd love to think that, but as I follow supply chain news these days, it dawns on me that economy is surprisingly complicated. Just as a random example from today, I wouldn't ever think that there may be issues in food production in the US because of shortage of carbon dioxide, ultimately caused by ethanol manufacturing shutting down, which is tied to all the oil being dumped on the market. Or another example, shortages of flour and yeast in stores were not caused by the shortage of actual product, but of commercial-sized packaging.
I like to think that my region will be fine, food-wise. But I worry that some non-obvious links in the food supply chain get broken and the situation will rapidly deteriorate. So even as we bake our own bread and pizzas now, I'm slowly increasing the supply of flour anyway (among other foodstuffs).
(The two functions are closely related, in that pre-lean manufacturing had all kinds of disruptions occur all the time, meaning their supply chains were essentially under constant low-grade stress tests. Lean logistics has been in part a massive effort to get rid of those unnecessary disruptions.)
Edit: We, of course, could not find any at the groceries, as of a few weeks ago. So, instead of buying two ten-pound bags, since none were available, we went to a restaurant supply store, to buy a fifty-pound bag... There were no lines, no shortage of product on the shelves, and if they sold it in smaller portions, we would have happily bought less.
On the bright side, we are now a strategic flour reserve for our friends and relatives.
The larger of a batch you have, the more likely there are eggs in there. Most bakers, pizzerias, etc. will use the flour fast enough that they won't hatch, but a home baker might not be so lucky...
I've baked cakes with two year old self raising flour (it's getting on for three now) and it's fine. On the foreseeable timescale of covid it's certainly not an issue. I used to buy 16kg bags from Shipton Mill which would last 3-4 months no problem.
Regarding driving down future demand: not likely more than in the very short term... flour has a fairly short shelf life. Have you ever used/tasted rancid flour? While it's not the end of the world, it's not something most people are likely to want use in a recipe more than once given a choice.
Based on?
> not likely
Again, based on what? Your intuition? You have some data correlating flour purchases with people unable to bake (and apparently unmotivated to use a search engine or read expiration dates)?
Storing flour in a sealed container extends its lifespan. Freezing it even more so. Anyone can easily learn these facts if so motivated.
Listen, I don't want to over-generalize but I've seen this on the Internet about the most mundane of skills: cooking, baking, doing your taxes. They're all just instruction-following. Sure the upper limit on the skill level is high but basic competence to get a usable product on all of them is like at the level a twelve-year-old could do it if they had the motor skills.
There are lots of people using flour who didn't before, but lots of it is going to go to waste.
many people let the humidity in their homes get too high and don't transfer some baking products to more appropriate containers than the simple paper bags mass packaging uses.
I’m keeping my freezer space for the stuff that actually goes bad.
But ya, aflatoxins are nothing to mess around with.
I also make bread, and you can be sure that I keep it in a dry place and make sure it smells fresh whenever I use it, even though I have no idea if moldy flour has a smell.
The stuff keeps for years if it doesn't get wet or bugs in it. Certainly my mums flour jar has some pretty old flour in.