Old Airborne Dog
Assistant Cook
Presumably most here know that (even without any contamination by assorted bugs, mould, etc) flour has a shelf life. What that shelf life is one of those "it depends" things, including what you're going to use the flour for.
I inadvertently did an experiment on that question last night.
While looking around in the basement of my parents' home looking for any old recipes my mom saved from my grandmother that might relate to my search for finnan haddy/cullen skink recipes, I saw some of those five gallon white plastic pails like restaurants get oils, sauces, etc in, nestled in a back corner under the stairs. I didn't notice them while executor for our parents' wills when they died three months apart back in 2009... I didn't do a detailed house cleaning at the time; I was involved in deployments to Afghanistan, etc.
Inside those white pails are vac sealed packages of all purpose white flour with packets of silicon dryer in cheesecloth sealed inside. Mom and Dad must have had a few prepper moments before they died, I guess, although if so none of us ever heard them mention it. Anyways, the flour has been stored in the equivalent of a blacked out root cellar with no temperature fluctuations for at least 15 years in those vac packed plastic bags.
So out of curiosity I whipped together a Yorkshire Pudding/German Pannocoek mixture with a couple of eggs and a bit of milk and this flour to have for breakfast this morning, stuck it in the fridge overnight as per usual, pulled it out to warm to room temperature and then poured into a 8" cast iron skillet preheated with a bunch of clarified butter to 450 F. and then waited 20 minutes to see what happened.
What I got was a big round thick pancake looking disc in the bottom of the cast iron skillet instead of the usual big mushroom growing out of the cast iron frying pan almost hidden beneath it. I was laughing to the point I forgot to take a picture of the sad, sad evidence before my eyes, staring forlornly back at me from the smoking hot cast iron frying pan.
It certainly looked nothing like what I usually see happening when this recipe is cooking in the oven:
And I ate it because I still had to have some breakfast.
Not bad... nothing special about the taste either good nor bad; if it was a recipe I'd never bother again.
Certainly nothing like the usual Yorkshire pudding/German breakfast pancake above (also makes a pretty darned good version of a Toad In The Hole with bits and pieces of sausage and herbs and spices when added to the batter when poured into the smoking hot cast iron pan and oil.
So I don't use much flour to begin with so I never have amounts getting old (wife has Celiac's disease so the presence of gluten is heavily minimized in the house). But I do know for certain now that flour quits acting like flour after some number of years, no matter how carefully you store it in the cool dark, vac sealed in plastic bags.
Maybe preppers have a method that works to preserve flour for years, but my Mom's efforts failed despite all the fac packing and silicon packets to absorb moisture from inside the vac packed flour.
As for this pail of white flour and another beside it that has similarly stored brown flour, it appears it will be used to make training snacks used as rewards when training Wirehaired Pointing Griffon puppies. Flavour them with beef and chicken stock and then bake until crispy, I guess. Never met a WPG that didn't like chomping on a treat that crunched like a heavy duty cracker.
I inadvertently did an experiment on that question last night.
While looking around in the basement of my parents' home looking for any old recipes my mom saved from my grandmother that might relate to my search for finnan haddy/cullen skink recipes, I saw some of those five gallon white plastic pails like restaurants get oils, sauces, etc in, nestled in a back corner under the stairs. I didn't notice them while executor for our parents' wills when they died three months apart back in 2009... I didn't do a detailed house cleaning at the time; I was involved in deployments to Afghanistan, etc.
Inside those white pails are vac sealed packages of all purpose white flour with packets of silicon dryer in cheesecloth sealed inside. Mom and Dad must have had a few prepper moments before they died, I guess, although if so none of us ever heard them mention it. Anyways, the flour has been stored in the equivalent of a blacked out root cellar with no temperature fluctuations for at least 15 years in those vac packed plastic bags.
So out of curiosity I whipped together a Yorkshire Pudding/German Pannocoek mixture with a couple of eggs and a bit of milk and this flour to have for breakfast this morning, stuck it in the fridge overnight as per usual, pulled it out to warm to room temperature and then poured into a 8" cast iron skillet preheated with a bunch of clarified butter to 450 F. and then waited 20 minutes to see what happened.
What I got was a big round thick pancake looking disc in the bottom of the cast iron skillet instead of the usual big mushroom growing out of the cast iron frying pan almost hidden beneath it. I was laughing to the point I forgot to take a picture of the sad, sad evidence before my eyes, staring forlornly back at me from the smoking hot cast iron frying pan.
It certainly looked nothing like what I usually see happening when this recipe is cooking in the oven:
And I ate it because I still had to have some breakfast.
Not bad... nothing special about the taste either good nor bad; if it was a recipe I'd never bother again.
Certainly nothing like the usual Yorkshire pudding/German breakfast pancake above (also makes a pretty darned good version of a Toad In The Hole with bits and pieces of sausage and herbs and spices when added to the batter when poured into the smoking hot cast iron pan and oil.
So I don't use much flour to begin with so I never have amounts getting old (wife has Celiac's disease so the presence of gluten is heavily minimized in the house). But I do know for certain now that flour quits acting like flour after some number of years, no matter how carefully you store it in the cool dark, vac sealed in plastic bags.
Maybe preppers have a method that works to preserve flour for years, but my Mom's efforts failed despite all the fac packing and silicon packets to absorb moisture from inside the vac packed flour.
As for this pail of white flour and another beside it that has similarly stored brown flour, it appears it will be used to make training snacks used as rewards when training Wirehaired Pointing Griffon puppies. Flavour them with beef and chicken stock and then bake until crispy, I guess. Never met a WPG that didn't like chomping on a treat that crunched like a heavy duty cracker.
