Codner's Wallop
Well-known member
- Sep 11, 2013
- 1,431
Weirdest one for me was flour. Supermarkets never ran out of bread.
Most of that flour ended up in the bin.
Now that was annoying cos I make my own bread all the time. I was looking for other stuff online (not lockdown related) and found that a Chinese supermarket I'd been to a few times had flour branded with a dragon or something. Rang them up and they posted a load to me. It came from Holland....
Now the flour wasn't bread flour but (because I make bread) I had a large bag of gluten which you add to wholemeal or low protein flour to improve it. Add a teaspoon or so to plain flour and it converts it to bread flour. I also had ample yeast as well. Not the silly little packets, but 500g worth.
So I'm now basically a small time bakery supplier.
A work colleague was going crazy with boredom, so I suggested making some bread for the first time, but of course all of the ingredients were unavailable. No worries, I'll post you some.
"How ?"
Well, I got a kitchen machine pack machine. Basically, I can vacuum pack stuff flat that will go in a large envelope and it will go in the post box, even a kilo of flour.
So off I went, vacuum packing yeast, gluten and flour. The gluten and the flour into thick A4 size very hard see through packed blocks and the yeast into a much smaller wallet sized block.
However, I soon realised what I had done. Rather than bread ingredients, before me was cocaine (the flour), a side order of unidentified horse tranquiliser (the gluten) and a cheeky freebie of heroin (the yeast) offered purely as a "taster".
It didn't just look dodgy, it was straight out of a film set. I sent a picture to my colleague and we seriously debated whether I should send it.
Well I did (next day delivery) and almost three weeks later it turned up (a few miles down the road) after being opened, thoroughly sniffed and re-sealed by the post office.
It's probably my enduring memory of the madness of the lockdown.
Totally kneadless