For those of you who have become enthusiastic bread bakers, but who find the issue of carting heavy bags of flour home from the shops (having paid over the odds for it), becomes a real bore, I have found a solution. All my bread flour now comes mail order from Shipton Mill with free delivery for batches of 30 kilos or more.
Now that sounds like an awful lot of flour, but don’t panic, there is a solution. What you need to do is get a few people to order together. It doesn’t take many to get through that much flour and it doesn’t have to be 30 kilos of the same flour, just an order which comes to a total of that. So, show someone else how to do the no-knead bread, then order together. I’ve found that three people who bake occasionally can easily get through 30 kilos of flour in a surprisingly short time. Since delivery is free for anything over this, you can just order that much and not have to store vast amounts of it at any one time.
If you bake every day for a family of more than four, you’ll find that 30 kilos goes like snow on a hedge! If you think about the recipe, which calls for 540g of flour, you will get just under two loaves out of a kilo bag. I get just under four out of a bag of organic light malted flour (which is our bread favourite) because I use it half and half with plain white bread flour. (I get a better rise that way.) When you start to add it up, you suddenly find that 30 kilos is only going to last about two months, baking a loaf a day! Suddenly 30 kilos doesn’t seem so much, does it! If, like me, you end up baking two loaves at a time sometimes, or you throw in a no-knead fruit loaf for breakfast, suddenly 30 kilos becomes just about five weeks’ supply!
It’s dead easy, you can order on-line and it arrives within a couple of days even from the other side of the country! It takes the hassle out of making your own bread and that just has to be good, doesn’t it!
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