Storing your flour and making Olive Oil Bread

I store up on a lot of food in the event that we have an emergency or a situation develops where food may not be readily available. As such, I on occasion, purchase food in bulk. A sample of this would be flour. However, flour as everyone knows can readily become buggy.

When it involves purchasing bulk amounts of flour, I can place it into 5 gallon plastic buckets with lids and store it for a long time. Let's face it with the prices of food continually rising, the 25 pound sacks are actually less expensive than the smaller ones, however you really don't want to waste money by having it go buggy or bad on you.

The popular seal-a-meal machines just do not successfully do the trick. They don't really protect your flour and a different method is certainly in order.

I have generally discovered that flour will not go buggy if it isn't already buggy to begin with. Nevertheless, the only way to ensure this is to freeze the flour in your freezer. The simplest means of accomplishing this is to place small quantities of flour into jars, bags or one of the wife's Tupperware containers, then freeze it for three days. At the end of the three days remove it from the freezer and let it sit for on a counter or table for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks refreeze it again for another three days. Repeat this process one more time.

Freezing the flour will readily kill any of the adult bugs which may be hovering within it however it does not kill the eggs, therefore you must freeze it to kill the adults then take it out of the freezer and let the eggs hatch and then refreeze it again to kill additional adults. A repeat of this process usually will usually kill the last of the bugs.

You could also place the flour in jars and dry heat packs the jars. This process would be similar in results to sealing the flour in the #10 cans with using the O2 packets.

I personally purchase my flour in the 25 pound packages and divide it up into one gallon sized Ziplocs. In each Ziploc I place 10 cups of flour. I next place the flour packs into the freezer for a matter of two weeks. This will kill anything that might be waiting in my flour. I remove the packs from the freezer and let them come to room temperature on the counter. Make sure to cover them with a towel because of its humidity and the resulting condensation could become a problem if you do not. After I feel that they are safe from both the adult bugs and eggs

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