The Flour Bucket

Three icing buckets ran out the same day at work.  That never happens.  I took the two with the best lids home and washed them out.  So now I had two 2-gallon food grade buckets and no idea why I had brought them home.

One quickly turned into a home for chometz and went into the hall closet for Passover.  That was a temporary thing, and it still left one empty bucket.

While I was scooping the flour for matzoh, and making the usual mess, I realized what the other could be used for.  Once Passover was done (the icing was kosher, but not KLP), I dumped the rest of the bag of flour into the bucket.  There was plenty of room left, so I got another five pounds out of the freezer and tossed it in as well.  Looks like the bucket will hold slightly over ten pounds.

Wow.  No more keeping a leaky paper bag of flour in a plastic produce bag.  No more unrolling the bag and having traces of flour fall everywhere.  I don't have to keep the backup in the freezer, because I can see when I'm running low and need to restock.  When the lid comes off, there's a 10" wide opening.  Even I would have a hard time missing that.  The bucket is tall, but does fit on a pantry shelf; I just had to move a few rarely-used items up one level.

What this really does storage-wise is open up space on the baking shelf for my bread flour and get ten pounds of flour out of the chest freezer.  I want to get back into making challah and doing a proper Shabbat dinner every Friday.  This might turn into making one batch of dough and using it to create a month of smaller loaves for the freezer, but it's an effort.

As for the other bucket, I'll probably keep that for cleaning and water transportation purposes.  Some people use them to store rice or beans, but I don't keep two gallons of any one bulk item other than flour.  I managed to fill a half-gallon jar with rice, and that will take me at least a year to use.

Just a reminder that flour does have a finite shelf life.  It lasts about a year under ideal pantry conditions, two if you vacuum seal it.  Leaving it in the freezer can extend that a bit, but not indefinitely.  Just because I can now store ten pounds of flour in a bucket doesn't mean everyone should.  I will go through that.  If you can't, pick a smaller container or leave it in the bag.