The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?

And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.

PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain that’s normally hidden. It feels like debugging some third party API has a bug, except on a much larger scale.

I think the joke is that people that start fresh baking bread at home start eating a lot more of it because it’s delicious.

Not only is it delicious, your home smells like a bakery with every fresh loaf and who can resist a fresh loaf of bread still warm?

Specialy given making bread better than the store is very likely, my father used to be a baker and has told me how stores use a yellow coloring to make it look like bread has lots of eggs but it has near none, or how they push yeast to the limit where bread gets the most air inside possible to make it look big, or how they buy the cheapest butter and so on.

Also, store bought bread today lasts a lot longer than store bought bread from when I was growing up. I can't imagine the chemical concoction that allows for this...

Probably calcium propionate.

And source control to keep initial mold spore counts low.

In Canada, the reality is that all the butter is the same anyway. All churned to 84% by the dairy board.

Centralized production...

> Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?

Because the commercial bakery wants the flour in a 100 lb bag, but the retail store needs 100 1 lb bags. And the commercial packaging lines can't easily swap to packing their product into 1 lb bags.

Not to single you out, but multiple people made that same basic comment despite that being the point of my post. Was this unclear?

And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.

I generally aim for clear and casual communication and it seems like I messed up somewhere.

> The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption.

If the majority of bread-eaters have pivoted to baking it at home, total bread consumption has very likely increased.

Restaurants and factories use much bigger (and plainer-looking) bags of flour than end-consumers, so retooling probably requires changes to the "paper bag" supply chain...

There’s no “bread” in bread, so the commercial bakeries are always going bankrupt, consolidating and squeezing every penny possible out of the business.

The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available.

> The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available

Huh? It’s very common for larger supermarkets to have their own bakeries (even in small cities) in the US. I get fresh bread at the Safeway in my city...

Bakeries in The Netherlands do quite well actually. Although they also sell patisserie and sometimes (too expensive) baking stuff, the main part is bread.

In the US, probably half of bread sales are through Group Bimbo and Flower's Foods. Direct bakery sales are a drop in the bucket.

If it works, it's delicious and you end up eating heaps more than usual.

If your first two or three attempts a baking bread fail, then you end up becoming one of those people with 85% of a 20lb bag of flour in the cupboard waiting for the weevils to move in...

(The temp calibration on my oven is way out. Doesn't matter too much for roasting chickens or cooking lasagne, but baking is more temperamental than that, and way too easy to fuck up. Luckily I only bought a 1kg bag of flour to fail hard with...)

You can still make crepes or roti on your stovetop, or porridge in your microwave. No need to let the flour go to waste.

Porridge is made from oats where I live. Is it made from wheat flower where you live?

Not commonly, but you can make porridge out of many things, including almost any grain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge#Varieties

Wheat flour's talents tend towards baking because of its high gluten content, so in a sense it's "wasted" on porridge. But if your oven isn't working it's less of a waste than literally throwing it away!

Porridge from fine flour?

It's certainly possible, see eg Velvet Porridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge#Wheat

You can get an oven thermometer for like $3, unless those have also sold out.

This only helps much if the calibration is off linearly - in my case not only is the calibration off but the temperature flux up/down is more pronounced than it should be. I still make do, but it's definitely very easy for stuff to come out burnt or undercooked as a result.

Other have suggested ways to check your oven temp control, but one way to mitigate the problem slightly is to add some thermal mass to your oven. Unglazed quarry tile makes a nice baking surface and a double layer of that will prevent big temp oscillations in your oven.

> but the temperature flux up/down

Have you checked if your air vents are blocked? Ovens don't have adjustable fires, they are always on/off.

I can't think of any kind of failure that would cause unusually high swings.

When the temperature sensor in caked with something that provides thermal insulation the resulting lag in temperature feedback would mess with the oven's temperature control.

Hate to be the one the point it out, but have you considered you might not be great at baking?

Bread machine is a just compromise for thosw type of folks.

> waiting for the weevils to move in...

Hatch. If you get weevils, they were already there just waiting to hatch.