Ay Corona has never seemed more appropriate

As I walked through the supermarket on Friday I am stopped in my tracks by the rows of empty shelves where the flour for baking once was. The Ay Corona song front and centre in my mind.

I kind of expected empty bread aisles and little milk like when it snows in the UK.

I must admit I had to do a double take.

Seventeen years in the UK and I buy flour for baking almost weekly.

Not once have I seen an empty flour shelf.

No flour in value supermarkets Aldi or Lidl on Friday.

None in Tesco, none in Asda and only about a dozen 500g ones in Sainsbury’s this morning at 90 pence each.

Still not one pack of any type of flour in Lidl today.

Has Ay Corona triggered a secret love for baking ourselves better

Or has hoarding flour become the new response to the toilet paper, pasta and sanitiser trends across the globe?

Has our fear of the unknown triggered a deep urge to restore Britain as a nation of bakers?

Speaking to the staff at Sainsbury’s I test my theory.

They confirm they’ve never seen the aisles without flour.

The assistant at Lidl didn’t even realise there wasn’t any flour.

As I pay for my baking powder, glycerine, buttermilk, honey and bicarbonate of soda, I hear the assistant explain that they’ve had queues since 07:45 this morning.

Queuing for what I wonder.

Let’s look at one possible reason

Own brand plain flour (1.5 kilo pack) costs (accurate according to online search at the time of writing):

• 45 pence at Aldi
• 45 pence at Lidl
• £1.45 at Tesco Express
• 95 pence at the Co-op
• 80 pence at Sainsbury’s (60 pence for the basics brand)
• 49 pence at Asda
• 80 pence at Morrisons

So, getting your hands on flour from Aldi or Lidl or Asda or Sainsbury’s if you’re a regular baker like me, makes perfect sense.

For 1.5 kilos of flour you can bake the equivalent of:

• 3 batches of my pancake mix (about 30 pancakes in each) from Naked Baking
• 6 loaves of aniseed rolls (mosbolletjies)
• 3 loaves of bread
• about 10 plain sponge cakes
• 100 rusks
• 5 Red Bush Tea (Rooibos) cakes
• 5 tray bakes serving 20-30 people easily, etc.

So, why are you stockpiling flour unless you are regularly baking

The world supply of flour hasn’t stopped.

When Italy had a wheat shortage a few years ago, the price of pasta went up everywhere.

This makes economic sense. Supply is less due to a shortage in the production cycle vs. demand remains the same.

Creating a false demand when there isn’t actually a real shortage doesn’t help.

Here’s why.

Let’s cost one of the simplest M’s Kitchen recipes from the Cookbook, Naked Baking, using low cost ingredients wherever possible.

Simple Pancakes

Whilst this seems a negligible increase, add the minimum wage cost of £8.21 per hour currently for over 25s and the cost before gas and electricity or rent or water or other overheads goes up to £5.25 or just under 18 pence per pancake.

For reference, it takes about 30 mins to make and bake. And I’ve not added any cinnamon or sugar or hot fillings. This is just the cost of the pancake (materials and labour).

And at an average portion of two pancakes per person, this could feed 15 people.

At 1.5 kilos of flour that’s around 45 people.

Panic buying pushes up the costs of goods for all of us

In uncertain times like those we’re facing, we should never have to pay three or six times more for the same product to bake things ourselves.

Wages haven’t gone up, nor has pensions and the risk of Statutory Sick Pay or no pay is very real for many families.

And as the Bank of England cuts interest rates to historic low levels, we should expect costs to go down.

Instead panic or what’s now called in the media “herd behaviour” is pushing prices up further.

Let’s Bake Ourselves Better Yes

It is total stress therapy, yes trust me.

But let’s think before we do things that potentially cause more harm for all of us.

Like my aunt said this morning on her Facebook post “We all have to eat and feed our children”.

Stay safe and happy baking.