Finding ingredients just one quarantine hurdle - Times Union

My how things have changed in the last eleventy hundred days of quarantine. Face masks are now a fashion statement, my kitchen table has become a home-school classroom for delinquent students, and flour and yeast have become the new toilet paper.

Back in mid-March, when I was pandemic prepping, I went through the grocery store trying to anticipate what I would need to get through the impending quarantine. Unlike most shoppers, I didn't rush to the toilet paper aisle. Years ago, we'd cleaned out my husband's grandmother's house and found she'd stored a small mountain of toilet paper. We'd laughed that a woman who'd lived alone for years would need so much of an easily obtainable commodity. But then I realized someone who'd lived through two world wars and the Great Depression might know something we didn't, and vowed to always stock two small mountains of toilet paper.

But I'd read enough post-apocalyptic novels to worry about what would happen if our food supply chain became seriously interrupted. With my food foraging survival skills limited to remembering to bring my reusable bags and always getting the shopping cart with the wonky wheel, I knew we'd be in trouble if grocery stores ran out of food. Learning to bake my own bread sounded like a good plan, but when I got to the baking aisle, the shelves were bare.

Apparently everyone else had the same genius idea I did. Either that or someone had come up with a recipe to make toilet paper out of flour. Soon, however, I began receiving emails promising the best bread recipes to bake during quarantine and my social media feeds were filled with pictures of my friends' sourdough starters. And just like that, a world where myriad products, from bottled water to steel belted radials, proudly proclaimed they were gluten-free had suddenly become a place where there was no such thing as too much gluten.

I haven't done a lot of baking, but unlike other lockdown fads — like attending Zoom meetings without pants or doing Lysol shots — this was a trend I was willing to try. Luckily, I did have some flour from when I thought I might bake Christmas cookies but never got around to doing it. In 2017. And I did manage to unearth a packet of yeast in our old refrigerator in the basement; but it, like our refrigerator's warranty, had long ago expired.

So we began searching area stores for the elusive leavening agent. I knew we were in trouble when we'd ask a beleaguered employee where they kept the yeast and were always directed to the next aisle over where Sasquatch was supposedly restocking it on the shelf next to the unicorns. Not wanting to come home empty handed, we'd grab another bag of flour, if they had it, to add to our growing collection. There hasn't been so much white powder amassed in one place since they hauled El Chapo out of one of his tunnels in Mexico.

I needed to start using the flour, so I tried skillet flatbreads because they didn't require yeast. The result was a rough approximation of a round-ish food-like substance with the same light and airy texture as the skillet they were cooked in. My family knew better than to say anything, but I could tell they were thinking that Lysol shots were becoming more and more appealing.

Finally I was able to order a 1-pound brick of yeast online, and I waited two weeks until it arrived in a Brinks armored truck. According to the King Arthur Flour website, this amount of yeast would allow me to bake 96 loaves of bread, or, to put it another way, approximately 96 more loaves of bread than I'd ever baked before. I wasn't using this time to learn a language, or lose weight, or clean my basement, so why not learn to bake bread? Inexperience be damned.

It turns out the lack of ingredients wasn't the only challenge. Bread baking requires planning ahead in order to give the dough time to rise and I have a congenital defect that requires me to do everything at the last minute. Which means my family gathers hungrily in the kitchen waiting for dinner as I try to convince them that it's bad luck to eat freshly baked bread before 9 p.m.

I still have 93 loaves-worth of yeast left, so I can't call bread baking a quarantine hobby yet. But at least I'm still wearing pants to my Zoom meetings.

Betsy Bitner is a Capital Region writer. bbitner1@nycap.rr.co-m

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Finding ingredients just one quarantine hurdle - Times Union
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