When Flour is in Short Supply

Flour might be in short supply right now, just when you need or want to bake more bread. There are ways to stretch the flour you have.

First, every time you empty a sack of commercial bread, empty the crumbs into a container and freeze. When you slice homemade bread there are usually more crumbs, so make sure to save those, too. When you have enough, put it your blender or food processor or work it with a fork until it's fine like flour and use it to replace up to a fourth of the flour in breads.

Other things than wheat flour can be used to stretch the wheat flour you have. Consider using a half cup of cornmeal, instant oats or hot cereal blend. If you have hot cereal like Wheatena, use that.

If you have a flour mill or a good food processor, so much the better. You can make flour from any grains, bought or wild (seed). Oats, rye and barley are the most common but don't overlook quinoa, millet and amaranth.

If you're a wild food enthusiast, you may have various wild grains or seeds that can be milled and added.

Don't be afraid to experiment, just keep a few things in mind:

Remember that it takes gluten for bread to rise and wheat is the best source for that, so you need wheat in some form after it has been milled.

Knead bread that has other grains in it a little more than with plain wheat flour. Whole grain flours absorb more liquid than processed white flour, so allow a little more liquid than your recipe calls for.

Make Your Own Bread

It's hard to find bread in some places right now, so it makes sense to make your own. Flour seems a little easier to come by and you can use white or whole wheat, spelt or other wheat types of flour to make loaf bread.

There are ways to make gluten free bread with other grain flours but you'll have to go looking for recipes there because I have never made that.

However, if you're short of wheat type of flour or want to stretch what you have, you can substitute a fourth to a third of other grain flour and still make a decent loaf of "light bread." Oat flour, rice flour and barley flour are commonly used. Be aware that they will impart a slightly different flavor to your bread.

No sugar? No milk? No oil? No problem. Bread: Frugal Staff of Life shows you what to substitute and how to do it. And if you don't have yeast, you can get sourdough started. Making sourdough bread is pretty much the same as making yeast bread, it just takes a little longer to raise.

Even if the shelves are empty you can still have bread - and better bread than you can buy anyway! 

Bread: Frugal staff of life

Some people are bread people; some aren't, just like some people love chickens or horses or fast cars and others are just not impressed.

I'm a bread person. I love to experiment with bread, and with the prices still going up (will it ever stop??), baking your own bread can be a money saver.

I said can be, but it isn't necessarily so if you use a bread machine, a bread machine mix or buy expensive flour and yeast. I have never used "bread flour," and I've never bought expensive specialty flour, either. I mill my own flour and my bread is always well received - and even asked for.


I use this basic recipe most of the time:

1 tablespoon (or one package) yeast
1 tablespoon sugar, or brown sugar, or maple syrup, honey, etc.
1 teaspoon salt or sea salt or flavored salt such as garlic or onion
2 scant tablespoons of fat: butter, shortening, lard, vegetable oil, olive oil, etc.
1 cup of liquid: milk, water, half water and half milk, potato water or even part cream.
Flour as needed, usually 3 - 4 cups per loaf, with extra for kneading.

Put the salt, sugar and yeast in a large bowl and mix together.

Warm the liquid with the fat in it until it's slightly warmer than is comfortable to put your finger deep into it.

Add to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Let it set 5 or 10 minutes for the yeast to start working.

Add flour, a cup at a time at first, then less until you have a fairly stiff dough. Turn it out onto a floured board and knead for 3 to 5 minutes, until it's smooth and not sticky, adding flour as necessary.

Let it rise once or twice, then form it into loaves and put it in loaf pans. Let it rise once more, then bake at 400 for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down and finish baking at 350 for 30 to 40 minutes more.

If you mill your own wheat, it makes a heavy whole wheat loaf. Bread is supposed to be heavy. Real bread is the staff of life, not a piece of fluff that you surround your meat and cheese with. Bread was originally (and can still be!) the major part of a meal.

Bread should be nutritionally important, not just white fluff. Leave the fluffy air for cake and other nonessentials and you'll fill your tummy for less - and be happy doing it.

Colored Bread

Someone mentioned "brown bread," the other day and I was reminded of other colors of bread. I made pink bread one time and another time it was sort of... purple, I guess.

The pink bread was made with wheat flour and milled dehydrated tomatoes - pretty good, too. I added garlic and onion to it, but should have added a little cheese sauce mix.

The purple came from a few beans that I tried to grow which didn't return enough of a harvest to make them worthwhile. I milled them into flour and added it to wheat flour. It wasn't as good as the tomato bread, but we ate it just the same - and as fast, too.

What else can you put in bread? Nuts and seeds, of course. Don't get hung up on sunflower seeds and almonds or walnuts. Try amaranth, caraway, lamb's quarter, or any kind of edible seeds, wild or not. Add oats, either rolled or milled into flour. Cracked wheat, barley and rye. Any vegetable that's been dehydrated to a crisp or hard texture. Sprouts can be added, too.

For the frugal part of this, you can use beans that are too old to cook up well, popcorn that won't pop and some of that squash you enthusiastically dehydrated last year and now can't find a way to use it up. Make "flour" of them and bake some bread.

Want to go a step further? Milled crackers or cracker crumbs. Unwanted pancake mix. Leftover popcorn... you get the idea.

Here are the "rules"

• Don't use much of anything unusual, maybe a quarter to a half cup for a loaf of fluffier stuff like popped popcorn, (chop finely by hand or with a food processor) and less for dense, small seeds.
  
  
• Don't use more than a fourth to a third total of any other flour than wheat without a recipe because some other flours don't have gluten, which is needed for the dough to rise.
  
  
• Go by the feel of the dough instead of a recipe. Some flours and combinations will absorb more liquid than others, so if the dough feels stiff, add a little more liquid.
  

This is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for complete novices at bread baking, but if you've baked bread before and you'd like to try something a little different, why not? Experimentation is how all those great recipes got started, anyway, and you can use food that would othewise be thrown out.

Maybe I should have called it frugal bread, but the color can sometimes be surprising. You can use a combination of things in bread dough, but keep the flavors complimentary. Tomatoes and cheese, rye and dill or corn flour and milled, commercial "bacon" bits are a few that work together well.

Try it. Half the fun of being frugal is in just trying it.

Real Whole Wheat Flour

Here's something I haven't done, but I would love to: Growing and Harvesting Wheat by Hand

Wouldn't it be cool to eat a slice of bread, fresh from the oven, that you'd created from start to finish? I mean, from planting it right down to harvesting, milling and baking it... that's real hands on living and something you don't find much of in today's world. It doesn't even seem realistic to do things like that, but people did it for most of human history.

It seems that we've been sold a bill of (commercialized) goods.

How did people survive before the last century or so? Too many people now don't know and if you tell them, they won't believe you. We're coddled, cocooned and protected from the real world so much that we don't even know it exists.

Anyway, back to wheat...

I've mentioned before (elsewhere) that I buy wheat at a feed store. That's not exactly true. It should read I bought wheat at a feed store. It's been... 6 or 8 years since I've done that and the reason is that I still have wheat! I don't even remember how much I bought, but it must have been a hundred pounds.

A hundred pounds of real whole wheat flour goes a long way, but probably not as long as mine has, if you use it all the time and use it exclusively. I sometimes use white flour with it to make a bread that rises better and I only bake for one person now, so it goes a long way.

Real whole wheat flour, ground at home and used immediately is better flour than any you can buy. Wheat germ, part of the wheat kernel, goes rancid pretty fast once it's broken or milled, so what you buy in the store is either inferior quality or has the kernel removed for longer shelf life - which is inferior nutrition.

That makes feed store wheat a lot more frugal in several ways.

1. It's cheaper. You can still buy wheat for a lot less than you can buy generic white, bleached flour (the cheapest of all flours).

2. It's more nutritous, having had nothing removed from it for any reason - and it hasn't set on the shelf, losing B Vitamins over time before you even see it in the store.

3. It has a much deeper and clearer flavor than premilled flour. If you've ever eaten it, you'll never be satisfied with "whole wheat" bread again.

4. It's more filling - more food than fluff. A glass of milk and a slice of real whole wheat bread will fill almost anyone up.

If you don't have a feed store in your area, maybe a day trip would put you in reach of one. As a last resort, you can buy wheat online. The shipping can be high, but if you go together with a friend, you will probably be able to buy enough to make it worthwhile. Remember to figure the cost against the cost of flour, and if you're really fair, figure it against the cost of the best whole wheat flour you can buy.

If, on the other hand, you're just frugal, figure it against the cost of the cheapest white flour you can buy. Chances are real whole wheat flour is cheaper. Then add in the rest of the benefits and it's still the most frugal flour ever!