Why is flour still usually packaged in paper bags?

[MikeS]

@BigT

Anyways, we freeze our flour (as we don’t use it that often), so glass is out.

Why? Flour doesn’t expand when it freezes (like water does), so you don’t have to worry about the jar cracking because of that.

[drastic_quench]

There’s a nice photo series of Marilyn Monroe wearing a potato sack dress, FYI.

[Lukeinva]

@ZipperJJ

People used to make dresses out of flour sacks during the depression (they musta been cotton, not burlap). Thankfully for the little girls, the flour companies caught on and put lovely patterns on the fabric. It helped sell flour!

http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_06.html

Similarly burlap rice bags are recycled today.

[Rhythmdvl]

Canisters are to passe. Modern families take advantage of the static electricity brought up in this thread: in the Devil household, we rub the flour on our head and hang it the wall.

[Mr.Milton]

Re the making of clothes from flour sacks:

In Petaluma CA, the mill was run by the Golden Eagle company (there is a Golden Eagle Shopping Center on or near to the site, I believe). Golden Eagle Flour was distributed throughout the area, which would include the then even more rural town of Boonville. Around 1900 or so, Booneville developed its own sort of cant called Boontling. Apparently the Golden Eagle bags were pretty decent quality cloth, as a boontling expression for a successful seduction was “gettin’ in her golden eagles”.

[ZenBeam]

@Interrobang

Flour is generally packaged and sold in paper bags.

These bags are frequently difficult to open unless you’re quite careful. Sometimes the paper tears, making them hard to close up and use for continued storage. Often, flour leaks out and has to be cleaned up.

My wife stores her paper bags of flour in plastic grocery store bags, to help contain any leakage.

[aruvqan]

@butler1850

I was so excited when I saw the link, but then I saw the price. I’ll stick with my bucket from the restaurant supply shop. But I love the tall thin aspect, along with the wheels! It’d fit so much better in my pantry. A bit smaller would be nice too. I don’t need to store 100+ lb of flour. 50lb would be just fine for me.

They have assorted price ranges and sizes, that is just the first one I clicked upon. I have one in the 50 pound range and one in the 200 pound range =) We use the 50 pounder for odd flours in separate bags and the 200 pounder for european style bread flour.

I have been baking my own bread for some 35 almost 40 years I don’t even bother using a recipe any longer.

[barbitu8]

@BigT

I’d always assumed glass was passe because people kept on breaking old family heirlooms and then finding plastic replacements so much cheaper.

Anyways, we freeze our flour (as we don’t use it that often), so glass is out.

I freeze my flour, too, because I use only whole wheat flour, which must be freezed (if there is such a word).

[voltaire]

@barbitu8

I freeze my flour, too, because I use only whole wheat flour, which must be freezed (if there is such a word).

Frozen.

[Pai325]

@Polycarp

It was the custom for much of the 20th Century, well into the 60s, for each household to have four graduated canisters, of pottery, china, or plastic, in which flour, sugar, coffee, and tea (in descending canister order) were stored after the containers-of-purchase were opened (bags of flour or sugar, cans of coffee)

I have a canister set still! But I keep it in my pantry and only use the flour and sugar containers.

[barbitu8]

@voltaire

Frozen.

I don’t keep it frozen, just freezed.

[butler1850]

@aruvqan

They have assorted price ranges and sizes, that is just the first one I clicked upon. I have one in the 50 pound range and one in the 200 pound range =) We use the 50 pounder for odd flours in separate bags and the 200 pounder for european style bread flour.

I have been baking my own bread for some 35 almost 40 years I don’t even bother using a recipe any longer.

Thanks for letting me know, I’ll check out the smaller sizes.

I’m the same way with regards to having a basic bread recipe in my head. Scoop flour, add water, yeast, salt, mix… adjust. I’d love to learn more about the details of what makes different things happen, but I have a damn good base product. I think the yeast gets in your system, and you have no choice but to make it part of your life.

[moejoe]

@Mr.Milton

Re the making of clothes from flour sacks:

In Petaluma CA, the mill was run by the Golden Eagle company (there is a Golden Eagle Shopping Center on or near to the site, I believe). Golden Eagle Flour was distributed throughout the area, which would include the then even more rural town of Boonville. Around 1900 or so, Booneville developed its own sort of cant called Boontling. Apparently the Golden Eagle bags were pretty decent quality cloth, as a boontling expression for a successful seduction was “gettin’ in her golden eagles”.

I love Boonville. The Dairy Queen on Main was a regular stop on trips up to Fort Bragg. Coming north that was the spot where you could hop on to 128 and relax into the trees and quiet. I did hear that they had a kind of private language, turns out maybe that was actually true?

[Derc]

[quote=“JKilez, post:28, topic:653368”]

I did not know about the static electricity thing, but I guess that makes sense. From videos I have seen, flour dust appears to be almost as explosive as pure oxygen.
[/QUOTE
Apologies if I seem pedantic but oxygen isn’t explosive or even flammable, but does support combustion. A cloud of flour dust can ignite explosively as you say from a flame or a static spark.

[ducati]

@filmore

A friend’s grandmother used to mix ingredients straight in the barrel of flour. She’d make a depression in the flour, pour in the milk, eggs, whatever, and mix. When the ball was the right consistency, she’d pull it out.

My BIL’s mom would do this. They were humble folk from the hills of North Carolina.

I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

They had a different way of living than what I was used to, but very efficient and simple.

Staying at her house for a week before Thanksgiving one year, I was helping make breakfast, and couldn’t find bacon in the fridge. This appeared to trouble her, and she stopped what she was doing, grabbed a rifle from behind the back door and went outside. :eek:

Apparently I was the only one who didn’t know what was going on. I was only 13 or so. My BIL followed her out, and she came back in the yard dragging a large pig with a rope. How he got the rope…nevermind.

Anyway, she dispatched the damn thing right there and told my BIL to “get it ready”,
and she headed back into the kitchen.

Later, I watched this old (55?) lady grab a couple of knives and butcher that pig quick as a wink. She brought me this big hunk of meat, and said “I’m sorry about this morning, dear. We’ll have bacon tomorrow.”
I don’t mind seeing wheat harvested and milled, but man, you don’t want to know where bacon comes from!

[Tamex]

I don’t know if my mother ever bought flour in cloth sacks, but I do remember her schlepping 25 pound paper bags of sugar home in the bottom of my little sister’s baby stroller. For some reason sugar excited me as a young child much more than flour did :). This would have been in the early 1980’s. The bags had red plastic handles, IIRC.

[kittenblue]

@ZenBeam

My wife stores her paper bags of flour in plastic grocery store bags, to help contain any leakage.

Buy her some canisters!

[Senegoid]

I decant my store-boughten dry foods (beans, macaroni, rice, malt-o-meal, etc.) into empty cottage cheese tubs, which I save for the purpose.

On opening flour bags: Didn’t they used to come with the top edge folded over and sewn up with a string? The string had one loose end hanging out. To open the bag, just pull the string.

On making garment from flour sacks: This became an industry of sorts in Belgium during the World War I era. When Herbert Hoover ran the Commission for Relief in Belgium in those days, Belgian ladies got into the habit of adding fancy embroidery to flour sacks, with patterns of flower and thank-you messages, which were then sent back to America. These can be seen in some museums today. (I saw some in a museum in Vallejo, that was mostly dedicated to the early ship-building industry there.)

ETA: From the above-linked web site: Collection of embroidered flour sacks (photos).

[Seanette]

@Lynn_Bodoni

The tea in those canisters was generally loose tea, not tea bags, by the way.

I THINK that I’ve seen 50 pound bags of beans in printed cotton sacks in Hispanic grocery stores within the past 20 years or so. I’ll look around and see if they still sell them.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen flour in cotton sacks in grocery stores not all that long ago. Quilters tend to like flour-sack prints, so yeah, they did start putting nice designs on the sacks way back when.

[Lynn_Bodoni]

I haven’t been to stores that sell flour in 50 pound sacks lately, and really, if you’re buying flour 5 or 10 pounds at a time, it’s not worth it to put the flour into cloth sacks. Paper will do just fine. A quilter might be interested in a piece of cloth from a sack that’s about a quarter or third of a yard long, but very few other people.

This particular store that I was talking about sold a lot of groceries in very large quantities, as well as the smaller quantities that most Americans buy. If you have a family of half a dozen or more, and you have beans once or twice a day, then that adds up to a lot of beans.