[Closed] Where to buy strong bread flour?

Aldi.

Tesco.

Sainsburys

There was no flour of any description in our Tesco on Thursday. And no eggs that weren't chocolate.

The main supermarkets haven't had any in stock last few weeks when we've been in them and I've been unable to get delivery slot when looking now - haven't played the game of waiting until midnight for new slots to become available yet.

There hasn’t been any for the last month. We’ve made our own bread, well the bread maker has, for the last 20 years. But we haven’t used it for 3 weeks now.

Actually no flour of any description for that time. It’s like there’s panic buying going on.

I'm still working my way through a big bag I bought from Costco an eon ago.

The main supermarkets haven’t had any in stock last few weeks

People tend to have cleared the supermarket shelves but 'your local shop' can always be worth checking. Even in the height of the panic buying prior to the supermarket implementing their new controls - when the pasta and bog roll isles were empty in the supermarkets less then an 100 yards away there were toilet rolls in the smaller shop windows and nobody was buying them. So just try some of your local minimarts. Supermarkets have isolated themselves from a lot of supply chains to make themselves more efficient - smaller shops are buying from the cash and carries that are also supplying the cafe and restaurant sector and those wholesalers now don't have a route to market for a lot of their goods.

So although I had loads of bread flour I was pretty much out of yeast - nothing in the the supermarkets, But plenty in the first small shop I tried.

Also - Chapati flour / Atta  is Durum wheat - its quite course as bread flour but it works. There can be large, cheap sacks of it about, even in supermarkets (normally) - but usually away from the rest of their bread flours as it kind of illustrates just how expensive little bags of  supermarket flour are.

We've made our own bread for years and never thought to stock up - now trying to find some bread flour and finding nowt about.

After not seeing any on the last couple of shop visits I'd be very tempted to pick up a couple of bags instead of the usual one if I saw any on the shelves. Now, I wonder why apparent shortages persist even with good supply lines...

I ordered some from http://healthysupplies.co.uk/ yesterday.

You have to order at 8am on Mon, Wed or Fri and there's maybe a 15 min ordering window, so be quick!

i usually try to shop at aldi/lidl. ive been in lately when theres been no flour/eggs but yesterday i saw plenty of both. think its just about the timing.....

Plenty of eggs in our Aldi but still not a whiff of any type of flour 😐

Turns out there's not a shortage of flour, exactly.

https://inews.co.uk/news/consumer/why-no-flour-supermarkets-baking-uk-coronavirus-lockdown-explained-2528688

It’s hit and miss but most have stocks when they open but can run out quickly. I think loads are home baking now for something to do opposed to stock piling. Eggs are readily available here in most stores.

I read an article yesterday which explains why there's none on the shelves. IN the UK the millers are geared up to bulk production. The 2lb bags in supermarkets are a pain for them to produce as they are mostly set up to send it to commercial bakeries by the tonne. People stocking up for the lockdown have stripped the shelves in a few days of the laughably insignificant percentage of home baking packs they would normally produce in a year. There's no shortage of flour, the bakeries aren't missing out, but the preppers and panickers have all got it on their pantry shelves just in case.

Edit ^^^ Flyingmonkeycorps has saved me looking for the link

Sorry of related but our local supermarket had now started selling 5kg bags of rice instead of the little 1kg boxes with individually wrapped sachets inside. Been wanting that for years and I'm guessing it's because it's the only size left they can get

Not convinced it’s panic buying going by that article.

It won’t take much of an increase in demand to outstrip supply.

No bread flour or yeast in any of our local shops for a month now.

Luckily we have starter on the go as we've been making sourdough for years.

I rang a local bakery and they sold me 10kg of strong white. They said they had plenty and just to come back when I wanted.

I usually get them in Aldi.

1kg is a shit size.

I usually buy them 5 at a time which lasts about 6 weeks.

Like wise grade 00 for pizza from sainsburies. 5 at a time.

Obviously I'm a villain for doing that at the moment. But luckily ive not seen any for ages to even go to 1 in 1 out.

A 5kg bag makes much more sense than 1kg bags. It seems you can have 1kg or 25kg. - 25kg is too much to store.- through channels open to me without going mail order.....I have the supermarkets and a Costco availible. I'm.not mailordering flour.

The good news is - while bread is better with strong bread flour - Ive had good success with regular flour. (That's hand made not machine made. If your using a machine it may not be so successful....or it might be - I don't know don't have a machine)

Just don't use self raising 🙂

Yup there was a report on the TV at a millers saying just that as the initial stock piling wiped all their stocks they’re pretty much now only producing at demand levels so the stocks arriving aren’t enough to fill shelves. They mentioned nothing about concentrating on commercial size I’d guess that would be in less demand like a lot of other products due to hotels, restaurants and catering places being closed or wound down.

From my days in a mill packing flour is a pain. When the supermarkets insisted on 25kg as max bag size our packing machine capacity dropped 50% overnight (600 bags an hour max throughput on the line). Moving to 16kg dropped that a further 33%, we stopped packing shortly after that as it was not cost effective. As pack size decreases the requirements for numbers and accuracy work against each other as the product sticks to the loading mechanism.

I would hope that packing plants have modernised since I last saw them but the need to ensure the pack weight meets trading standards requirements limits a machine in throughput as the tolerance is in 10's of grammes either side of the declared mass. It used to be one large flour dump as close to pack-size as possible followed by a trickle top-up to meet the weight. The trickle introducing unavoidable delay into the system.

I've worked in flour milling for 30 years so do have some knowledge.
The mill I work at is now a bulk only mill approx 400 Tonnes a day this usually goes out in 26 Tonne loads. We service a wide variety of baking company's making bread, pizzas, biscuits, pasties and those cake/orange/chocolate things 😉 sole supplier.
We used to pack flour but only for commercial use. 32Kg 16Kg and some 10Kg for Chapatti wholesale. As we are group of 7 mills the commercial decision was taken to concentrate the packing to 3 of the sites.
90% of our bagged flour goes into in-store supermarket bakeries and smaller craft bakers.

Only a few places pack flour in the "shoppers" size and I think its less than 5% of the UK flour sales. Talking to a friend who works on a site that packs the small bags he said the UK isn't set up for every household to buy flour all the time as that in his time has never been more than 20% of households buying flour and that usually peaks during GBBO.
I'm lucky in that I can get flour any time & our company as a gesture of thanks has given each employee a 16Kg bag of general bread making flour. The only problem now is yeast.

Oh yes your right Sandwich packing flour is a pain, costly & risky due to bag damage.
The machines have got very accurate but are a sod to maintain.

We've been using Wilton Wholefoods for years to buy our home baking stuff from. Buy loads of flour, seeds, spices, dried fruit etc once a year from them.

https://wiltonwholefoods.com/

Just had a look through the artisan flour mills list and none appear to be working.

https://www.sourdough.co.uk/british-artisan-flour-mills-by-region/

Thank you STW - I knew you'd come up trump's.

@Winston - you've solved it. Seems obvious now. I rang a local bakery and they're gonna sell me some bread flour on Monday when their delivery comes in.

I'm a happy chappy!!

@MrOverShoot - 👍

Q: with so many food outlets closed, hotels, restaurants etc surely the supplies they would normally have used, probably from markets or wholesalers, must be  available for the general public? The food/flour etc still exists in the supply chain it just needs to be re-directed

We got some with our delivery this week. Open to offers, but my son wants to bake more bread today. Hopefully we’ll get some Camembert to dip it in!

@edenvalleyboy  Nice one. Thank my wife - it was her idea!

I guess the purity of cocaine must have shot up overnight as it's now cheaper NOT to cut it with baking products!

Just watching Saturday Kitchen and they say you can blitz down porridge oats in a blender to make coarse flour.

Works well for soda bread I should think

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/simple-soda-bread

Not convinced it’s panic buying going by that article.

I should have put 'panic buying' in inverted commas. The supermarkets played a blinder really - got themselves on the news every night with pictures of cleared their shelves regularly pocketed a couple of billion while all around them were shops with plenty of stock - bog roll, pasta, flour, paracetamol were all readily available in any shop I looked in but the message being relayed everywhere was that there was non. Meanwhile piped messages in the isles telling customers they are limited to three items is a good way to say 'buy three items'.

There wasn't any panic buying really - people who were panicking would have made the effort to look elsewhere.

There wasn’t any panic buying really – people who were panicking would have made the effort to look elsewhere.

That might be true where you live but in many places the lack of basic food items in the shop was very real.

Talking to a friend who works on a site that packs the small bags he said the UK isn’t set up for every household to buy flour all the time

Thats evident just looking at the proportion of shelf space used for flour really - supermarkets make more shelf space available just for different variants of one brand of toothpaste than they do for all of their flour. But hey can dedicate the whole length of an isle to different shaped bottles of one flavour of coke.

That might be true where you live

It was true anywhere I went really - not just where I live. But in certain areas it was the situation was more accute - we did have to post a couple food parcel to members of the London metropolitan liberal elite at one point!

We have a traditional mill (powered by a restored water wheel) half a mile from us but they're closed.
I'd kill for some 00 flour right now 🙁

ElShalimo
Member

@MrOverShoot – 👍

Q: with so many food outlets closed, hotels, restaurants etc surely the supplies they would normally have used, probably from markets or wholesalers, must be available for the general public? The food/flour etc still exists in the supply chain it just needs to be re-directed

You are correct though our mill supplies less than 1% of our output into those type of places.
The issue is the capacity to pack the small bags, there are only a few mills and dedicated packing plants set up for this.
The smallest size we pack is 10Kg and thats Chapatti flour everthing else is 16Kg minimum. apart from wholesale places there is very little outlet for larger pack sizes

C'Mon then where did you go to compile your list of shops that have plentiful stock?

It was true anywhere I went really – not just where I live. But in certain areas it was the situation was more accute

Was true about two weeks ago. Now the best bet to get stuff I've found is sainsburies.

Aldi not bad. Local spar and coop are decimated and not seen much in way of major stock replenishment for a while

Just picked up some flour and yeast from the local farm shop. Nothing in the local supermarkets - Aldi, Tesco, Asda & Sainsbury.

5kg of Allison in my cupboard but no yeast or bread machine anymore, daughter borrowed it, may make papier- mache as I have a party balloon and plenty of free time

C’Mon then where did you go to compile your list of shops that have plentiful stock?

Glasgow's small shops had plenty of stock, - when the care home my mum stays in locked down along with other families I had to help the home stock up with key toiletries as the staff were having to minimise their contacts outside the home -  and there were plenty (and the shops were otherwise well stocked) even though the supermarkets were sold out.  A friend of my GF's in Troon needed to self isolate and we;ve been collecting shopping for them - and until this week when supermarkets started to get their stocks back in order we bought all they needed from small shops. On the hight street in Kilmarnock any small shop had everything that was supposed to be in short supply - often in the window so not exactly hidden. Here in the boondocks my local shop has been giving daily updates of what they have and they alway appear to maintain a good stock and I bought the yeast we've got (plus some the above self-isolatee) from a minimart in a back road in Auchinleck.

The food parcel we sent down to London was pasta from Holland and Barratt and from a Keystore (although we were tempted to buy it from Anne Summers)

Maybe you're fortunate that you guys up there are more stoic, less irrational eg look at the response to bad weather Vs SE England

We live between Halifax and Huddersfield and the shops look like a plague of locusts have been here for 2 weeks now. This is not a liberal metro elitist area!!

Family and have friends reported similar in lots of places in the UK... Oxford, Leeds, Anglesey, Lancashire, Kent, St Alban's. The only guys not reporting this are in Glasgow and up near Aberdeen

Maybe Scotland has better supply chain management and policy in place, combined with a less reactionary response?

For anyone without yeast, try knocking up a sourdough starter (google how to) and have a go at making bread that way. Very simple really, but demands more time and is a bit less forgiving than yeast baking. But since time seems to be what many have at the moment..... give it a go

no yeast needed for soda bread, don't even need buttermilk, you can sour milk with vinegar or lemon juice instead

@theotherjonv - we use basic live natural yoghurt from the supermarket and mix it with milk.

Add lots of seeds too for a more interesting bread.

Aberdeen and shire didn't have that. Maybe folk up here can think outside the box. As I said initially it was the case but within a couple of days they were stripped bare like the rest.

I still use my local coop for staples such as milk and bread. But forget it for pasta/rice/anything in a tin / flour

I managed to order a 16kg sack from here earlier this week.
www.fwpmatthews.co.uk

Matthews flour is pretty good, I nearly went to work for them when the mill I worked at in Gloucester was bought out and closed.

They have been through some turmoil in the last few years as their borrowing was nearly twice their asset value. We had a head miller join our firm from them last year as he thought they might fold.
Hopefully this upturn in trade might save them, though the profit margins in standard flour milling are stupidly low I hope that their speciality range has a higher profit margin?

Stupid Q: how long does flour stay "fresh" for once opened? It does have a best before date but how long before it's goes to a state where it's not great?

A 1kg bag of wholemeal lasts about 2 weeks here and was thinking about getting a 16kg bag

TBH the term "fresh" is subjective.
Flour usually has a shelf life of a year less so for wholemeal and coarse brown as the oils in the wheat germ goes rancid.
Many bakeries prefer flour with a bit of age on it as its more consistent. The original firm that owned our site used to market their flour as "Bin Proved" many years ago we used to pass "Diox" gas through flour to improve the colour and artificially age the flour!

The flour will gradually dry out (if stored correctly) as the paper sack is breathable so you will find you need slightly more water in the mix to achieve the best results.

Plenty in Sainsbury in Prestwick this morning,

Don't rule out your local convenience store, ours hasn't really suffered at all during this recent period, I think folk attacked the supermarkets and assumed the wee shops would be bare.

We’ve just ordered a 16kg bag from Hobbs House Bakeries - hello@hobbshousebakery.co.uk

Apparently the problem is not a lack of flour, but a lack of packaging, so if you’re happy to buy the packs intended for hotels restaurants etc, there’s plenty available.

ditch_jockey if your near Hobbs bakery your a lucky man 🙂

And your spot on its not lack of flour its lack of flour in the silly little sizes 😉

@MrOverShoot - does your mill sell direct to the public and have online sales?

We had a head miller join our firm from them last year as he thought they might fold.

Heh 🙂

I don't think we do, though I have an account as years ago I used to supply a friends wife with flour for her massive home baking habit 😀
Have a look here
https://www.4flour.co.uk/products/

bearnecessities
Subscriber

We had a head miller join our firm from them last year as he thought they might fold.

Heh 🙂

I think that might be baking your thinking of 😉

Alright pedant! Better?

We had a head miller join our firm from them last year as he thought they might fold.

Trouble at t'mill.

For anyone without yeast, try knocking up a sourdough starter (google how to) and have a go at making bread that way.

That's what I've been doing. It's a bit of a faff, but I leave it to prove in the fridge overnight which is a bit more time efficient.

bearnecessities
Subscriber

Trouble at t’mill.

I hope not as I'm on call this week till 6am Monday 😉

For those doing sourdough the slow cold over night prove ranos mentioned is well worth it. Bake first thing. We use a lidded cast iron oven dish which goes into the oven for 40 minutes on max before the bread goes into it. Replicates a steam oven and gives better rise.

We were low on bread flour and struggling to get any however fortunately managed to get 25kg of pizza flour. Should last a few weeks.

In Aldi in Harrogate they had the grand total of three bags of plain flour at 9.30am and I took one of them. The person on the checkout said flour is the one thing they are still struggling to get from their supplier.

Ended up getting some from a ‘reuse low waste’ place but they were limiting to 1kg per customer and you had to spend £5 on other items.

Not much baking to be done by our girls.

We know people who’ve had success buying big bags from Bako.

our local (small, independent), supermarket down in East Sussex has had flour every time I've been in recently. I am meant to have my regular batch of 00 arriving in the next week - though we'll see if it is delayed/cancelled due to 'shortages'.

Bakerybits.co.uk still has plenty of stock of flour etc.

Probably get shot down on here now but I just made a year and share scone to have with the coffee, 15 maybe 20 mins of my time, 225g proper self raising flour, 25g of sugar, 40 g of butter, half a cup of milk, wee dash o bicarb, 13 mins in the pre heated oven and some rasp jam

Tear and share f%®©✓™¶g predictive text

@redmex - put kettle on, we're all coming round for elevenses

Have a look whether you have a zero waste shop nearby. We have two in town and both have plenty of flour as they buy in bulk as per the previous page so their supply lines are barely affected. You'll be pleasantly surprised at the prices too - I rarely have to go to a supermarket nowadays between those and a local CSA

Those in Ipswich or close by Makro had white bread flour (16kg) and yeast on the shelves yesterday. The yeast is the Allinson dried stuff in a tin not the rapid use variant. I have an opened bag of patent white (AYLI Mr Overshoot so around 11.5% protein?) that I can let you have a kilo or three of @ 56p a generous kilo.

The weekend bakery has some good info on sourdough and other loaves for those needing some ideas.