Several years ago when I started baking my own bread, Landlady used to bring in big sacks of flour from Costco. I thought that was really cool, y’know, like a real baker. Then that supply dried up – after a while the only reason she was paying for a Costco membership was because sometimes I gave her money and asked her to bring bulk food up, and it wasn’t worth it – and I started looking for other sources of flour.
The one little food market in the increasingly crappy town nearest where I live sometimes had Bluebird flour in 20-pound sacks, but it cost damn near $1 a pound and wasn’t especially good flour. Sometimes I could get it at the big town about 50 miles away but I go there rarely and like to keep between 50 and 100 pounds of flour on hand. It was becoming a problem. The supply-which-must-never-dwindle was dwindling.
A solution came from the damndest place. The aforementioned crappy little town used to have two dollar stores until one recently closed. That one always carries flour, and it’s cheap, but it’s a lousy house brand that makes Bluebird look like exotic designer flour ground with the dainty bound feet of dedicated nubile maidens from the Isle of Flouros. It’s somewhere in the Aegean, kind of a trade secret. Don’t bother looking for it on any map. You can practically taste the dessicated cockroach fragments. I’d rather not use it but I would if I had to. It was at least cheap and available.
Then the situation changed dramatically. Somehow or other the local Dollar General ended up with a pallet of Gold Medal, way better than you normally see around here, for $2.50 a sack. I, along with neighbor L and a few other people, made that supply go away quickly. Lest the situation turn out to have been a fluke, L had a talk with the manager – and yeah it’s just a dollar store but this ain’t no big town. This guy knows his customer base – and he started stocking it whenever possible. We go shopping there almost every Saturday ’cause that’s coupon day, and when there’s Gold Medal on the shelf we descend on it.
20 pounds at a time, I’ve been able to refill my flour pails and even start working on the overflow tub.
When I first moved out here, I’d have looked you in the eye and declared with a quiver of conviction in my voice that I didn’t have the slightest remnant of city-boy snobbishness left in me. But it still took months before I’d lower myself to shop for food in a dollar store. Turns out you can get the best deals there, if you just keep your eyes open for what’s worth it and what isn’t.
‘what’s worth it and what isn’t. ”
Yup. The past-due vienna sausages aren’t. Blech. The “Sensitive” toothpaste, OTOH, is the same as the big name stuff except it tastes better except it’s 4 bucks cheaper.
Hope your flour pails and tubs are galvanized steel trash cans – rats and mice can and will chew through plastic.
BTW Can we have an update on your rat trapping efforts?
You’re lucky to have a discriminating manager – my local dollar store carries mostly food from China, and given the regularity with which Chinese companies sell their own people poisoned cooking oil, rice, fish, grains, baby formula, and canned food it’s difficult to find anything to eat there.
It’s interesting that food can be grown, harvested, processed, canned, packed in boxes, put on pallets, trucked to a seaport, loaded on ships in China, moved to America or wherever there’s a major distribution point, unloaded, shipped to wholesalers, trucked to corporate distribution points, loaded on trucks for individual stores, trucked to the stores, and after all of that time and expense sold for less than American produced foods. Still puzzling over that despite much education in economics and daily practice in budgeting.
In my experience with the depredations of rats and mice, I have learned that they can chew through plastic but rarely do. I make extensive use of plastic food-grade buckets and have never had even a half-hearted incursion into them. Never any evidence of an attempt, even though my storage shed clearly teems with rodents. Tubs like Rubbermaid and Sterilite are more likely to suffer damage and require inspection and more careful storage, but even there I have only had one tub seriously raided in six years. It seems to depend on the contents. If a rat sees enough benefit to going to that much effort, it’ll do it. Or possibly it’s a scent thing. Truth is, rats don’t seem particularly attracted to flour whereas beans or dehydrated potatoes need more serious protection.
The rat that lives under my woodshed is smart enough to avoid my trap no matter what I bait it with and cocky enough that I could actually kill it almost any time I want by going out after dark with a pistol and a spotlight. I see it nearly every time I check the yard at night.
But what’s the point? It wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. Killing a rat only seems to create an opening for two more. I could kill a bunch of them by spreading poison promiscuously, but that would endanger the dogs and anyway then I’d have to smell the damn things. Landlady poisoned a rat in her powershed and nearly ensured that her batteries stopped being serviced, because I hated going in there.
It certainly is the little things in life that make it nicer. Like you I was a bit of a snob with regards to Costco, Wal Mart and those dollar stores but as things have changed (wife retired = income reduced) so have my sensibilities. Just this morning we started dehydrating a batch of home grown Roma tomatoes and when I finish this post I have around 23 liters of wine to bottle.
Good find! I’m really fond of the Dollar Tree in the city, where everything really is $1. I’ve been amazed at the number of products that are made in USA/Product of USA. Any time I have to go to the city I’ll always stop and stock up.
Our small town Dollar General has prices not much better than the grocery store and definitely not any better than Wal-Mart. Don’t think they’ll be around long.
Even though I liven in a small city with options, I buy lots of groceries at the “dollar” stores. I generally buy basics and keep,a good eye on quality. the Family Dollar generally has gold medal flour in stock for that 2.50. I buy there because the prices and customer at the name stores, Walmart, Safeway, Frys suck. I won’t pay extra for poor service. Fresh food comes from food city a great place to shop, just check the expiration dates.
No need to worry about city-boy snobbishness until you start grinding your own flour from whole wheat kernels. Wheat kernels by the way keep much better than already ground flour, and to palates more discerning than mine, fresh milled flour yields a superior tasting bread (reportedly).
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, unless you are AFRAID of being called a city-boy snob. (buck, buck, buck b’gaw!) (that is my attempt at typing chicken noises)
All you would have to do is pony up a few hundred bucks for a mill, and enough power (electric or otherwise) to run it, and the extra time to oversee it, and adjust your recipes to deal with the whole-wheat flour instead of that city-boy refined white stuff. Simple.
It might even be cheaper – in the long run of a decade or so – to buy bulk wheat instead of flour. The wheat berries will keep for years and years, they say.
So, are you brave enough to make your own bread from flour that you milled yourself?
Dude, I’m brave enough to make the bread. I’m just not brave enough to pay for the wheat berries and the milling gear. Even after you have the hardware, that’s when you find out the unground wheat costs more than already-ground flour.
Joel, please reconsider your tolerance for rats. Or mice. They carry all kinds of interesting diseases that often have permanent effects and are difficult and expensive to treat. They have fleas. Breathing dust or droppings in an enclosed space where rats live is really dangerous. They transmit diseases to dogs. If you can shoot rats I think it would be in your best interest to do it as fast as they show up. And dispose of the bodies while staying as far from them as you can – maybe moving them on the end of a long stick into a sealable plastic bag, if you have any. Also remove rat nests, since fleas and disease organisms can live in them, but don’t touch the nest materials. Sealable plastic bag again. Rat urine also carries disease organisms. Bleach spray from the dollar store any place you’ve had rats or mice. You’ve mentioned that you have migraine headaches, but severe headaches can be symptoms of rat diseases that you may have had but recovered from on your own. Please shoot the rats.
Do you put oxygen absorber packets in with your stored flour to help keep it from getting rancid? Or do you have another method?
I didn’t even have to leave the city to start buying at the dollar store. I love that place.