Just a Little Extra Protein

This past weekend we had an outbreak at chez Pastry. A neighbor family was leaving town for a year-long sabbatical, so a couple of weeks ago they brought over all their partly-used pantry foods. It was a bonanza of oils, vinegars, pastas and sauces. Woohoo! Unfortunately among the bounty was a sack of semolina that turned out to be full of flour beetles. By the time we noticed them they’d gotten into, well…just about everything. We needed to clean out the cabinets anyway.

Pantry pests happen to everyone at one time or another. You probably know the experience. You’re doing dishes one evening and you notice a couple of little moths with stripey wings flitting about. Who let these darn moths in here? “Honey,” you call to your spouse in the next room, “we’ve got to make sure we’re keeping the screen doors closed. Moths are getting in.” But of course no one is letting the moths in. You’re bringing them in — in live egg form, in your flour.

Insect eggs and other, ehem…impurities…are in all flours, however they’re more likely to be alive in organic flours because they aren’t treated with fumigants (otherwise they wouldn’t be organic). But left sitting around long enough, most flours or meals will eventually hatch moths, usually either Indian meal moths or Mediterranean flour moths. Both are extremely common US pantry pests, and each have a life cycle of about six weeks. So if you don’t want them to hatch, you need to hurry up and eat them. You need the protein anyway.

Something I find interesting about pantry moths is that they don’t occur on or near wheat or corn crops in the field. Rather they’re specifically adapted to human activity (milling and the like) in the same way cockroaches are adapted to living in our homes. And are they ever destructive. Globally, it’s estimated that humans lose something on the order of $10 billion worth of milled grain to them every year.

But I know what you’re thinking: if some kinds of flour have fewer live moth eggs in them than others, shouldn’t flour makers tell us that? The answer is of course they never would, since an argument over who has fewer live insect eggs in their products is a pretty much a no-win contest. Kind of like a Senate candidate standing up and declaring: “I have only solicited anonymous sex in an airport men’s room on one occasion, compared to my opponent who’s done it at least four times.” There are some things you’re better off just not bringing up.

But a word to the wise baker: of you’re keeping a lot of flour around it’s best to keep it in the freezer. This is especially true of organic flours, but it’s a good rule of thumb just generally. Freezing not only kills off (or stunts the development of) pests, it prevents the oil in the flour — especially whole wheat flour — from spoiling. Plus it frees up pantry space. If you just can’t spare the space and need to keep at least a little flour hanging around, buy a bag of mass-market bleached flour (which will have the lowest live-creature content) and keep it in a sealed container. That way, if anyone is born on-premises, they’ll have nowhere to run.

15 thoughts on “Just a Little Extra Protein”

  1. I am wondering if I should show this to my wife? Right now we have four lb.s in a sealed container in the pantry and five in the refrigerator.(not the freezer)

    What about cornmeal, in the freezer also?

    1. Oh definitely, corn meal especially. Being less processed than most other flours/meals it has also sorts of interesting stuff in it. And if it’s stone ground it has lots of corn oil in it. Freeze it for sure.

      It’s a good excuse to get a chest freezer, no? I never had one until about two years ago…I don’t know how I ever lived without it!

      Joe Pastry
      Baker & Whirlpool Stock Holder

  2. Not that many folks keep a ton of dried pasta, but if you do, it’s best kept frozen or at least in the fridge, as well. Learned that the hard way!

  3. Other secrets to moth free living….

    If you don’t have the freezer space to keep stuff frozen forever just freeze grains for three days to kill any larvae you may have brought home (bulk food stores are the worst offenders with all those open bins)

    Bay leaves allegedly repel them so I keep a couple in my flour containers. As far as I can tell they do not affect the flavour.

    Plastic bags (even heavy ziplocks) and cardboard are no match for the moths. Keep everything in sealed glass/plastic/metal containers.

    They like to lay their eggs up high so vacuum and or wipe down the inside tops of cabinets and drawers, the ceiling and inside light fixtures.

    Maintain your sanity by thinking of all the more terrible things your home could be infested with.

  4. Is it the same danger with wheat berries? I have a collection of whole hard and soft white wheat berries and whole hard red wheat berries in heavy duty gallon size ziplocks. I don’t have enough room in my freezer for my stash.

    1. Hey Audi!

      Wheat berries keep very well, no question. Better than flour for sure. However pests are definitely still a risk with them, so keep your eyes peeled.

      – Joe

  5. argh! we have ANTS at the moment. those little suckers sure do know how to push a guy’s buttons. geez.

    turns out they found an open packet of marshmallows, at the very back of the cupboard, that was 3 years past it’s date… at least something thought they were still delicious!

    marshmallows are gone, but the ants still live in hope…

    Chris from…

    1. And being from down under they were the size of small fire trucks, no doubt. This why I stay up in the northern hemisphere where it’s safe, thank you very much.

      However we had a similar problem last year with some sweets dropped down behind the fridge. Black ants had a party with that one. The year before that it was mice…not the marsupial kind, of course.

      – Joe

  6. weevils happened to us a while ago, and now we keep all our grains in glass or plastic containers. I had no idea eggs were already in the flour, though! That makes me shudder a bit.

    1. Yep, it’s a little unappetizing. There are entire government publications devoted to the “impurities” that are permissable in flour, and all sorts of other products. Read one and you’ll never eat figs again, I promise you.

      Really, it’s better not to know.

      – Joe

  7. The flour that I use slowly (regular white, cake flour, barley, cornmeal) lives in the freezer. The bread-baking flours (whole wheat and unbleached white bread flour) are stored in the cupboard. I use up the small supermarket bags of flour in just a few weeks. Doesn’t last long enough to get bugs.

    If I bought a 25-pound bag of flour, it would be cheaper, but I’d have problems with storage.

  8. Sorry to hear that you had to deal with that!

    I really dislike pantry bugs (after, many years ago, having to throw out 3/4 of my cooking/baking supplies after returning from 3-week vacation during a heat wave to discover that one recently-purchased bag of flour *had* contained weevils and that they had gone traveling throughout all the kitchen cupboards; looking into a bag of walnuts and not being quite sure is an unpleasant experience). So we have taken a fairly cheap but perhaps excessive solution: freezer-weight gallon-size ziploc bags around basically everything pantry-bug-edible (using 8-12 cup plastic containers instead for bags of lentils and other floppy stuff so they can stack tidily in the cupboard).

    This means that if something hatches somewhere or if ants invade our home (again), we do not have to be squinting into the raisins, then the lentils, then the flour, cornmeal, pasta, oatmeal, nuts, etc. and do not have to throw out hundreds of dollars in food. If it’s in the same ziploc bag/plastic tub as something that has bugs, out it goes! If it’s in a sealed bag with no bugs, it’s fine. This stops most infestations in their tracks and discourages outside intruders because there aren’t any bits of spilled flour, etc. on cupboard shelves.

    I reuse the bags with the same type of food as long as they have neither bugs nor holes. It wouldn’t work against mice or other chew-a-hole-in-it pests, but it’s otherwise been very, very effective.

    One does occasionally get comments “What, are you preparing for a flood?” when the uninitiated see ramen in a ziploc baggie in our cupboard, but it works so well that it’s worth occasional mockery. 🙂

    I also try to buy things from stores with fast turnover after seeing pantry bugs in some bags of cornmeal *in the grocery store*. Ick.

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