Chairman of the Hoard

I understand if you’ve been guilty of hoarding during the COVID-19 pandemic. You didn’t mean to–it just happened.

It was accidental for you, too, right? Or am I just projecting?

Ok, just speaking for myself here: I never planned on being a bougie hoarder like everyone else. And in a way, I like to believe that even in hoarding, like Frank Sinatra, I did that sh*t my way...

I had a bread machine. And I didn’t have an overly optimistic view of the future of the nation’s food chain supply. Like everyone else, I was more or less stuck at home, and hoping to minimize the number of times I had to set foot outside of my santcuarious home.

So naturally, it made sense to put the bread machine to good use, and at least have a fresh supply of one glutinous staple with which to nourish my family if the supply chain were to go sideways.

I feel like up to this point, most people can relate.

Unfortunately, it appears that too many people could relate. As anyone who has tried to find baking supplies over the last two months has indubitably discovered, every ----- body has decided to open up a boulangerie in their own homes.

What is interesting is discovering this via a delayed response.

You see, like many people, I decided to try out my local grocery stores Pick-up option. For a while there, the only way to get a time slot was to order almost a week out in advance.

If you’re not overly familiar with this process, it goes something like this: you place your order whenever (typically 4 hours to 6 days before your scheduled pickup time), and then about an hour before your timeslot, some poor soul goes through the store shopping as if they were you.

…and it’s at that point in time you discover what is not in stock. Maybe via text, maybe via phone call. Either way, this has becoming a defining experience for this new era in which we live. Well, at least for me.

During my last physical trip to the grocery store, I had bread flour on my list, but despite visiting three different stores (as retold in Death By Hangnail/Pants Epidemic), the run on flour had already begun and I came home empty-handed.

So over the next month, when planning my bi-weekly supply runs, I would engage in some wishful thinking and include bread flour in my grocery order.

After the second such fruitless supply run, I think a little bit of my sanity broke off and floated off to the great beyond.

Despite really not wanting to set foot in any stores, I had no choice but to take a calculated risk and see what I could find in Walmart and Costco. For the record, had it only been bread flour, I would have just suffered the indignity of not being able to participate in the mass baking hysteria alongside the rest of the nation. But I had other, more serious needs that were not getting met, such as paper towels, toilet paper, and Easter candy.

By the time Walmart had broken my heart on the day in early April, I had tallied a total of 6 failed attempts to procure bread flour over the course of 5 weeks.

But guess what I discovered Costco sells?

Bread flour.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that they might have it. I just turned the corner on that fateful Costco aisle and found myself face to face with a 50 lb bag of the finest white powder this side of Colombia.

But 50 lbs.? Ridiculous right? Who has the kind of money to invest in–wait, waaa?!? Only $12.95?!?

Whatever sane, reasonable part of me that had been clinging on up until that point finally released its grip…

..and fell into Don’t-Give-A-Crap-Canyon.

Did it matter that it was a completely unreasonable amount? ----- no. I was tired of not having any ----- bread flour, and I was staring at essentially a permanent solution to that problem.

Desperate times call for desperate measures right?

Speaking of “measures”…

That big-ass bag of flour sat on the back of the Boss Lady’s car in our garage for about week a de-coronafying, while I had to mentally come to terms with what I had just done.

Seriously, what the hell was I going to do with 50 lbs? And where would I even store it in the meantime? And the last thing anybody wants is for the garage rats to make a comeback…

Eventually I decided to embrace my inner prepper and prepare the heck out of the flour. I had the fantastic idea to pre-measure and mix all the dry ingredients (except for the yeast) for my favorite bread machine recipes. That way all I would need to do is just pull out one ziplock baggie and just toss it in the bread machine with the water and yeast–and easy-peasy I would have fresh bread just like that!

Also, my experience with bread machines has never been as quick, clean, and convenient as their marketing departments would lead you to believe. Somehow it always takes me a good 15 minutes, with 12 of those being cleaning up all the darn flour everywhere. So really the genius of my idea was to only make one big flour mess all at once, instead of every single time I used the B.M.¹Huh. Look at that. It didn’t initially occur to me that “Bread Machine” and “Bowel Movement” have the same ambiguous initials.

Now, before we go too far down that path, I just wanted to skip ahead a bit and get the obligatory bougie photo-of-my-food out of the way first. That’s required for all quarantine bakers, right?

Without further ado, here is my first focaccia–made by hand nonetheless! (I.e., I didn’t use the bread machine, and instead chose to waste 40 minutes of my life learning how to knead bread at a serviceable level.)

When I finally set aside the time to parse out 50 lbs. of flour into a to-be-determined number of ziplock bags, I enlisted my mother to assist me. Now, this was kind of cruel on my part, as she has a wheat allergy and despite her efforts, wouldn’t be able to enjoy a single crumb of her hard work. Don’t judge. I’m pretty sure I’ve already punched my ticket to hell on several occasions.

Of course, I had to have her capture the overly-optimistic moment, because, yeah, I figured it would eventually make it into the future annals of history that my writings will indbutiably be, and whatdya know? Here we are…

My eternal optimism was short-lived though, clocking a lifespan of exactly 48 minutes. It was a little under an hour in when I realized that, despite having pre-packed six future loaves of bread, we didn’t seem to have made much of a dent in the bag of flour.

Curious as to how long this undertaking might actually undertake, I took a peek at the label on the bag:

I had to do a double take. 756?!? Crikey, what had I got myself–and my mom–into?!?

I tried to do the math in my head–something that I’m usually pretty good at as a scientist–but, I kept on coming up with ridiculously scary numbers. I finally just had to sit down with a pen, paper, and a calculator just to make sure the numbers were accurate.

Okay. So each loaf called for 4 cups of flour.

A serving is 1/4 cup, so 4/(1/4) = (4*4)/1 = 16 servings per loaf.

We have a bag full of 756 servings that need to be bagged up.

Therefore, 756/16 = ….

47.25 Ziplock Bags of Flour

Sh*t.

Okay, let’s keep number crunching: it took 48 minutes to get through 6 bags:

48 minutes / 6 bags = 8 minutes/bag.

Assuming we’ll lose a few cups in the process, let’s just say we’ll end up with 46 bags (loaves) total.

46 bags * 8 minutes/bag = 368 minutes * 1 hour/60 minutes = …

6 Hours (and 8 minutes) of Flour

Fuuuuuuuunk…that got out of hand real quick-like.

Yeah…that wasn’t going to happen. I’m too old for that shit, and I sure wasn’t going to drag my poor mother along for such a mind-numbing ride.

We soldiered on and prepped 6 more bags before officially proclaiming “Copulate this crap! We out!”

Yada, yada, ya, and now I have 35 lbs of flour living in a trash bag in my office.

The point of the story is, if you’ve found yourself hoarding in the midst of this pandemic, it’s okay–you can tell me; I won’t judge you.

Like the Good Enough Book doth say:

“He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone…but he that is with an unholy amount of baking supplies, let him freely fling crusty loaves of bread unto the masses.”

What jesus would do…if i recall correctly

Content created on: 21/23 May 2020 (Thurs/Sat)

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