skip to main content

OK to freeze flour?

18 years ago

Today I bought 50 lbs of flour in 5 lb sacks. I placed the sacks in plastic shopping bags and placed in my freezer which is getting a bit low this time of year. With all the baking I do, figured I get ahead of the price increases, for the time being anyway. Anyone freeze flour?

Sort by:Oldest

Comments (13)

annie1992
18 years ago
Hey, Shirley, it's nice to see you back!

I freeze whole grain flours all the time, it keeps them from getting rancid. I don't usually freeze all purpose because I use it fast enough, but I'm told that freezing it will keep it "bug free" in addition to storage.

Nope, not enough room in MY freezer for flour, I keep taking stuff out and putting other stuff back in!

Annie
disneyginger
18 years ago
I freeze flour all the time. It really does help keep it from getting weevils and other little flour critters. And, it is just fine to use later.

I have only brought home flour critters ONCE. And, that was ENOUGH!

Once you see the litle flying moth type critters, you know you have trouble, and they can get into EVERYTHING from pasta and flour to you name it!

Supposedly they are just added protien and won't hurt you, but the thought of eating bugs doesn't settle well with me, so I threw out my whole pantry, scoured and santitized it, then started over after a week of letting things settle.

I buy King Arthur flour almost exclusively these days and I have never had a problem and my baked goods turn out better than they ever have.

I do buy some Southern Flours from time to time, like White Lily and store them in the freezer for when I make cakes and things like coffee cakes and doughnuts.
Related Discussions
Nutrion of milled wheat: Freeze flour vs. dough
Q
Comments (2)
As a longtime home flour miller, FRESH IS BEST when it comes to maintaining the nutrients in flour, as you already know. Studies have shown that vitamin loss begins as quickly as 3 hours after milling. I'd choose to make bread and freeze it, but you can also freeze the flour ASAP after milling. Freezing only slows down the nutrients and germ oil from degrading in the flour, it doesn't stop it, so it's also only a short-term solution. Bread (baked) will have a storage life of about 3-months in the freezer. Using honey in your breads destined for freezer storage will help them keep better than using sugar in the recipe. It helps maintain the moisture in the crumb. It's also important to wrap breads tightly. I suggest one or two layers of plastic wrap, then foil. The tight wrapping helps keep the moisture from migrating from the crumb of the bread, through the crust and forming ice crystals. I freeze nearly all my breads and I never have a problem with ice crystals. I also slice the bread AFTER it's thawed. Unfortunately, frozen dough has an even shorter freezer life than either the baked bread or freezing the flour. Frozen dough keeps 4-8 weeks. And as Annie pointed out, you can have a yeast failure when you freeze dough. A "good" freezer dough recipe will use more yeast than a normal recipe because freezing will kill some of them. Commercial frozen dough has a much higher ratio of yeast in it. I hope you get your mill soon because I'm sure you will love it. I saved my $1 bills (seemingly forever) so I could purchase my first mill, and now I have a bevy of them!!! -Grainlady
...See More
Freezing almond flour thumbprint cookies or dough
Q
Comments (2)
Thanks...good idea. For future use, I'll also try freezing some cookies and some dough to see if it will work.
...See More
Freeze Warning/Frost Adv for 11/10/16--NE OK
Q
Comments (20)
There's nothing wrong with that. I do that sort of freezing for later a lot at peak tomato harvest, which for me is usually June-July and peak fruit harvest, which is about the same time frame. I often have a freeze full of stuff in fall that I do go back and can eventually, or I use it for cooking. This year I kept up on the fresh preserving fairly well though. And, so course, some things like cucumbers need to be canned immediately so I always do them first even if it means freezing fruit and tomatoes for later. I did a huge amount of food preservation pretty much daily in June and July, mostly canning but also quite a bit of freezing and fermentation. When I stopped watering the garden and walked away from it in August or whenever it was, I didn't know if it would produce anything else. We were so hot and so dry, and at that point it doesn't matter how much it rained in May or June because that rain is long ago all used up And, I wasn't sure how the kitchen remodel would go and if I'd have a usable kitchen in time to do any fall food preservation either. Thankfully, the kitchen is almost done now, so I can use it for food preservation. Surprisingly, the garden is still a huge jungle and has produced a lot since the weather cooled down some earlier in the fall and rain began falling again. The plants don't look great as it still is too dry and they remain wilted most of the time, but they are productive which is what matters. And it is weedy, but snakes hide in weeds, so once I lose control of the weeds, I cannot do major weeding to get rid of them until after we freeze. Of course, it still hasn't rained enough, and it has stayed hot too long but the heat has been good for the garden in the sense that it remains in production. I harvested a ton of stuff about 2 weeks ago and have been preserving like crazy. I've also continued to harvest occasionally since then. The latest things I've made are pepper vinegar and a currently fermenting pepper mash that eventually will be made into hot sauce. I need to harvest again before the weekend frost/freeze, as there's still a lot of peppers I left in there to continue to grow and size up. When I walked through the garden earlier this morning, I made a list of things to harvest: watermelons, winter squash, birdhouse gourds, about 10 kinds of peppers, fennel, dill, lima beans and southern peas. There's green tomatoes that I may harvest on Friday, or I may just cover them up overnight. There's Laura Bush petunias that are newly sprouted volunteers about 4 weeks ago and about to bloom. Those usually can handle temperatures down to at least 20 degrees, so I'll work around them when cleaning up. I'd like to start cleaning out beds, but every bed has blooming plants in it and the garden still is full of butterflies and bees. So, I'll be patient and wait for it all to freeze. I really don't want to deny the bees and butterflies any of the flowers that remain even if it messes up my own timetable for garden cleanup. No matter what we do, I never have enough room to store everything when harvested, so it piles up in bowls and buckets all over the walk-in pantry, laundry room, kitchen and breakfast room. We have been working on fixing that. We put in a tall cabinet type pantry with pull-out drawers in the kitchen for normal pantry type food storage so I now can use the walk-in pantry only for produce and for home-preserved foods. I think that will help a lot. We need to reconfigure the interior of the walk-in pantry,move some shelves around, etc. (we moved the door to that pantry from the kitchen to the breakfast room), improve the lighting in it, etc. but that won't be hard or take long. Tim still has been working 6 days a week so we haven't worked on much of anything lately that requires power tools and his expertise. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be having to harvest produce and hang on to it for a couple of days before going to market. You're going to need a food storage facility bigger than your camper, Kim! Hazel, Are you good about watering indoor plants? If so, almost anything would work in a hanging planter. If you aren't really good about watering, then you could put something like a succulent in the hanging planter. Succulents like to stay on the dry side and don't need a lot of water. Just be sure you hang it in a place that has enough natural light. Dawn
...See More
Will Sausage Freeze OK?
Q
Comments (14)
The only reason I’d try sous vide is that the dogs would marinate in their own juices (“purge” is what the cool kids call it) and then get grilled with a coating of that liquid, which I could also reduce down and spice up for a glaze . . . I did about 30 lb of ribs for a party last year. Sous vided in gallon freezer bags with aromatics, salt, sugar, spice, all bags hanging in a cooler that I’d prefilled with hot water. if They spent 12 hours under sous vide, then when I got an “order” for ribs I just grabbed a bag and grilled for ten minutes. This worked well with my limited grill area. I might try similar with the dogs. Hmm, will have to plan the right soundtrack. To pay homage to the Top Dog of my college days, it would be Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Talking Heads, Steely Dan, Elvis Costello, Pretenders, and the other stuff we were listening to then. I was a Top Dog regular again in 1997-1999, when I returned to Cal for grad school. Things were different, Telegraph had been taken over by chain stores and bubble tea shops, most of the bookstores were gone, only one record shop left, maybe one head shop. The college kids, and they were kids to me, looked a lot more serious and strained. Not so much free spirited kids with sandals and philosophy books. The average kid was an Asian teen, humping a huge backpack of books like a Marine on patrol, grimly trying to maintain a “B” average against 30,000 of the smartest kids in the world. Top Dog was a little bit of the Berkeley of my youth, but I wasn’t. One night a friend and I went to Top Dog, it was about 1 am, we were both in tuxedos, someone called me “sir”, I felt old and gray :-(
...See More
doucanoe
18 years ago
Actually, the freezer is where I keep my flour with the exception of a few lbs. of AP which I use regularly.

Linda
kayskats
18 years ago
thanks, folks ....

being a southener, I swear by White Lily flour and cornmeal, which can't be found in my area in Maryland. I've ordered (and frozen) White Lily Corn meal with great results. However, for some unknow reason, I didn't think about freezing flour -- thought it'd pick up too much moistured.

Thanks to all of you, I can now have my fave flour on hand.
lpinkmountain
18 years ago
I freeze my flour, (actually all types of grain meals) but seal in plastic to prevent it from picking up moisture and flavors from anything that might be lurking around in there. Being single and not much of a baker I don't use it up fast enough to leave a lot on the shelf.
beanthere_dunthat
18 years ago
Yep. I freeze any grain that comes into the house for at least three days to discourage any univited "guests" fro mhatching. if I know it's going to be a while until I get to use the grain, it stays in the freezer. I double wrap it (or break it down and use the food vac on it) to avoid condensation (from open/cosing the freezer and keep it from picking up that freezer smell. (I don't have a separate freezer, so I sometimes notice the fridge smells "migrate" to the freezer.

And I completely agree with you about White Lily. IMO, it's the only flour that makes a "proper" biscuit or scone.
song98
18 years ago
I know this thread is about freezing flour (which, like others, I do all the time) but after White Lily flour had been mentioned, I have to comment. I have tried so many other brands of flour to make biscuits, but NO OTHER BRAND EVEN COMES CLOSE TO MAKING OUTSTANDING BISCUITS LIKE WHITE LILY DOES!! With White Lily self-rising flour, it is hard to fail! With White lily, my biscuits always turn out to be flaky and light and delicious! Unfortunately, I can no longer get White Lily flour here where I live, so I have to order it on line and put the extra bags in the freezer.
sally2_gw
18 years ago
Me too, I freeze flour and other grains, except for my AP flour.

What's odd is that here in the Dallas area I haven't been able to find White Lily Flour, either. What's up with that, is Dallas not Southern enough? I've not tried it, but I'd like to.

Sally
donnar57
18 years ago
I freeze all flour - the only flour not in the freezer is whatever is in my canister at the time. Like another poster above, all it took was one time when I had creatures in the flour, to make me sold on keeping flour in the freezer. I'm told that bay leaves will also help keep critters out.

I also freeze rice, pasta, and even some pasta mixes. Then again - I have a 14.0 cu ft chest freezer, so I have a lot of space in my freezer. The door shelves of my side-by-side also contains flour - open and in big zippered freezer bags.

DonnaR/CA
dixiedog_2007
18 years ago
I freeze flour ALL the time now unless I am going to use it VERY quickly. With the humidity here - bread and all does not do well sitting out or in the pantry.

After buying my first bread machine and buying "bulk" quanity of flour I learned the hard way. Almost everything in my pantry had to be thrown away due to moths/worms and such. It was awful. NEVER again!!!
beanthere_dunthat
18 years ago
Sally, I think Texas is sort of like Maryland and Kentucky -- they move in and out of being "southern" depending on whose making the map. :) I grew up in NC and at that time we sort of considered Maryland "north" and Texas "Western". :)

White Lily does ship, but you have to buy quite a bit to make the shipping worthwhile.
grainlady_ks
18 years ago
If you can't find White Lily, some other brands of bleached Southern All-Purpose flour are: Martha White, Gladiola, and Red Band. - Grainlady
partst
18 years ago
Can someone tell me how you package uncooked rice for freezing?? Do you freeze in original package or wrap tightly and put it in zip locks or what? We donÂt eat it often I am always afraid it will have gone bad. Sometimes I will cook an entire package and freeze it in 1 cup packages for when I just need a small amount and that works out good.

Thank, Claudia

Related Stories

GARDENING GUIDES Texas Gardener's March Checklist

By J. Peterson Garden Design

So long, freezing temperatures. It's time to kick off spring planting, lavish attention on lawns and sprinkle seeds to your heart's content

0

LANDSCAPE DESIGN Celebrate a Sunny Climate With the Right Leafy Palm for Your Site

By Steve Asbell

So you get freezes or floods. So your garden is small. These palms send excuses riding off into the tropical sunset

HOUSEKEEPING Outdoor Home Prep to Do Before Hard Winter Hits

By Buckminster Green LLC

Avoid cracking, rusting and rotting during freezes by taking care of these tasks now

HOLIDAYS Host a Perfectly Imperfect Cookie Decorating Party

By Alison Hodgson

When sisters get together with their kids to decorate cookies, formality is the last thing on anybody's mind

DREAM SPACES Houzz Tour: Hugging the Rocky Cliffs in Big Sur

By Mitchell Parker

Cascading down a rugged site and generously encased in glass, this California home takes full advantage of its ocean views

GARDENING GUIDES Got Frost-Damaged Plants? How It Happens, and When and How to Prune

By Noelle Johnson Landscape Consulting

Don’t rush to cut back brown, brittle growth after a freeze

FEEL-GOOD HOME 21 Ways to Waste Less at Home

Whether it's herbs rotting in the fridge or clothes that never get worn, most of us waste too much. Here are ways to make a change

KITCHEN DESIGN Houzz Call: What’s Cooking in Your Kitchen?

By Stacy Briscoe

Most of us turn to recipes, videos and culinary shows when we cook. Where do you set your cookbook, tablet or TV screen?

LIFE Kitchen Traditions: Tomato Season Meets a Family Legacy

By Tiffany Carboni

Somewhere a Sicilian great-great-grandmother is smiling at a bowl of American-made sauce

NATIVE PLANTS 10 Top Plants Native to the Desert Southwest

By Noelle Johnson Landscape Consulting

Get a thriving garden despite unforgiving conditions with these tough, unthirsty, sun-loving beauties

Sponsored

Wannemacher Interiors

26 Reviews

Customized Award-Winning Interior Design Solutions in Franklin Cnty OH

More Discussions

Tried and true tart recipes

18

No-Bake Summer Desserts?

20

What do you eat when it's REALLY hot?

30

Sigh. I bought some ice cream...

16

National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, Anyone?

10