91–100 of 210 posts
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Maybe keep a toaster facing out in the freezer she can put the bread into? Will never be out of shape.
Genius idea. We'd need more toasters though or we'll only be able to hold 2-4 slices!
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It's only a win for the store if they would sell out of the product if you purchased two, as they would only make the profit off of selling one item to you rather than two. That's why those food bank donations annoy me, they supermarket effectively takes a cut of all the donations.
Not completely true! For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent. I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely. It is a flavour date. So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of don…
Food banks have grocery store-like buying power and relationships with wholesalers and local producers, and in my experience nearly all of the food they distribute comes from those sources.
The can drives around the holidays are mostly just for awareness. At the ones I worked at checking, sorting and packing those was very costly in labor both paid and volunteered.
We always accepted direct food donations because americans are super fucking weird about donating money to the immiserated, but will also get very mad if you turn away their useless donations. Which is bad for PR, so against the goals of the org. We always accepted them but "how can we not" was a constant question.
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I remember that after I moved house I needed to buy 5 new energy saving light bulbs. The store near me had an offer: > £1 each or 4 for £5 I checked with the floor manager if that was accurate and how could I buy 5. Turns out I had to do it in two different transactions. Moral of this story is: store promotions often don't make much sense.
In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones). And “two for $5” and “buy one at $5 get one free” are considered different - the first almost always has to work out to $2.50 each unless they get very explicit with a “save $1 when you buy two” wording. Most stores don’t bother.
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My wife does this. The only complaint I have is that when there isn't space, she forces it in anyway and then you end up with mangled, frozen slices that don't fit in the toaster.
If you have the space, a second deep freeze is a game changer. You can often find them for cheap or even free, the ones from the 90s seem to last forever.
On a side note, with energy prices (which are typically high in the UK compared to some other places) I'd be loath to use an "old" freezer. We once rented a place, and I found their circa 80s freezer user more electricity than we did for the rest of the flat.
I've always been one to prefer newer, more energy efficient devices even at a higher initial cost (it's somewhat of a hobby of mine to see how energy efficient I can make things in my home), it's times like these where I feel it's actually paying off.
As a German the cultural differences around bread are really interesting. Already the cartoon picture of the half loaf of bread is so fundamentally different to what I am expecting it to look like. Also people in the comments saying they rarely not finish a loaf of bread. This [1] is how it looks like here and when bought at a bakery it's usually so big that we buy it in quarters and even that lasts a couple of days.…
Realizing that you can put bread in the freezer changed my life - well, at least my bread buying habits ;-)
Yup. I've been making my own bread for ~4 years, mainly due to family. When I know I have a busy week ahead or travelling, I make two loaves that weekend and freeze one. Family gets good sourdough bread, and the toast from frozen is in no way noticeably different.
My method:
1. Do whatever it is that you do before baking a loaf of bread
2. Bake the loaf for around 2/3rds the target time. In my case, this is about a half hour. I bake these loaves at 200°C, on a baking stone and covered with a huge aluminum salad bowl to sorta emulate a steam oven. At the end of the half hour, the crust is still white due to the bowl, and just starting to go brown on the tips of whatever cuts I added.
3. Take the loaf out and let it cool for a couple hours
4. Seal it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer
5. Proceed with life for a time
6. When in need of more bread, take a par-baked loaf out of the freezer and put it on the counter, and pre-heat the oven to 200°C
7. Once pre-heated (~20 mins later, let's say), put the still-frozen loaf (sans plastic!!) into the oven uncovered, and cook for another 15 mins
8. Take it out to let it cool and enjoy
IMO a par-baked and then frozen loaf is noticeably better than a single-baked loaf, at least when using a home oven. I speculate that this is because a home oven needs a longer total baking time than a (hotter, steam-injected) commercial oven to fully bake + get the right crust, and that extra time turns into a drier crumb. But I further speculate that the par-bake-and-freeze technique preserves the crumb, since the crumb is really pretty much done by the time the 30-min par-bake is over, and the crumb ends up spending a good chunk of the 15-min finishing bake just de-thawing rather than drying out.
I thought it was an app to match people that want an half loaf so they can share a full loaf of bread. That would be innovative. But no, it only searches store inventories for half-loaves for sale. I love the laser focus on half-loaves anyway.
Realizing that you can put bread in the freezer changed my life - well, at least my bread buying habits ;-)
Rolls are especially poor in the freezer as they have to first be half defrosted then cut then toasted and even then the top has a slightly odd taste, probably due to the thickness. Of course, I'll still stick them in there rather than wasting them, I'll just be miffed about it.
Apparently correct way is cutting at angle so that loaf became thin in the center of bread. This way whoever cut bread after me can decide if they want full or half. In my method there is a sudden step which forced you to first cut the leftover half.
This applies for long breads, not round one.
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Not completely true! For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent. I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely. It is a flavour date. So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of don…
Have you talked to the food bank about their policy on past-date canned food? I know at least one food bank where they told people not to donate any food past the date as it will get tossed (plus additional staff and volunteer labor to sort through the stuff). I assume this is common for liability reasons at least.