In my town our favorite grocery, a small business, hasn't had yeast or flour for at least a week. There are ways around that. I found an online outlet where I could order flour while I still had some in the house. They had several brands. You wouldn't recognize some of the brands but possibly they only sell to food services including bakeries so that's more of a recommendation than a problem. The delivery date in the carrier's email is 10 business days from when I placed the order.
Once you get your flour you can breed yeast. I've posted about this before but I can expand on it now.
Breeding yeast is called brewing sourdough starter. You need at least a cup of rye flour or two cups of white wheat flour. Rye flour has more natural sugar in it and brews up quicker. You can use rye starter with wheat flour and get a good product, as well as going straight to rye and pumpernickel bread. I have never tried brewing starter with whole wheat flour but a post on the web says it works the same way as with white wheat flour.
You need a jar that will hold a quart of starter at least, and a warm place for it to brew in. You need room in your fridge to store the starter between batches -- if you have a "between batches".
Put 1/4 cup warm water and 1/4 cup flour in your jar, stir smooth, and let it sit uncovered 24 hours. If you are using rye flour, repeat this twice more and on the fourth day you should see bubbles of different sizes. With wheat flour, you will need to keep feeding the starter at least three more days before you see bubbles.
You now have one or two cups of starter. You need to test its health. Take half your starter and give the rest a feeding, then leave it out uncovered. If the test fails you need the rest of the starter to be warm so you can re-build.
We'll do the test with French bread which is simple even if it does take a couple of days. Take half a cup of starter, add half a cup of warm water and a cup of wheat flour, stir and let sit covered 8 hours in a warm place. Add the same amount of water and flour at the end of 8 hours and then once more, which sits overnight. This process is called building your sour.
In the morning, add two cups flour, mix thoroughly. This is your sponge; let it sit an hour. Now add at least two more cups flour plus 1 teaspoon salt, and knead into an elastic dough, adding more flour as it gets sticky. Slam it down on your kneading board once in a while. Put back in your bowl and let sit covered in a warm place at least an hour or until double. Do this once more. Then shape into your baguettes, cover with a
damp cloth and sit in a warm place one hour or until double. Preheat oven to 425, bake 10 minutes, reduce heat to 375 and bake another 15 minutes. Turn the oven off, take the bread out, turn over and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow. Put it in and close the oven and let it cool gradually.
If the bread didn't rise as much as you wanted, don't worry about it. You can slice the baguettes longwise for sandwiches or French bread pizza, or diagonally for tartines. If you have been feeding your starter daily in the meantime, the next batch should work out better.
Personally, I prefer to make bread rolls than bread loaves. You can freeze the rolls and thaw them individually for sandwiches or as dippers for soup and stew; they make great mini-pizzas. So when you eat up the old test, do a new one but instead of making baguettes, divide your dough into 6 to 10 pieces, roll into balls, put on a cookie sheet, and flatten slightly. Cover and let sit in a warm place for an hour, then bake 15 minutes at 375. Turn the oven off and let them finish baking.
You can also make mini-baguettes for hot dog rolls.
You can also make pretzels with part of the dough. Cut about one third of the dough into six pieces. Roll between your hands into long ropes. Now make a pretzel shape with each rope. Glaze with mixed egg yolk and water, and sprinkle on a a little kosher salt. Put straight into a hot oven for 15 minutes, then turn the oven off. Voila, soft pretzels! By the time they are done, your rolls are risen and you can bake those.
Use the same glaze on the rolls and you can sprinkle them with sesame or poppy seeds; the glaze will hold the seeds on.
You can add two tablespoons of starter into any recipe for a heartier flavor: pancakes; english muffins; croissants.You can even make croissants with nothing but sourdough, just remember they'll come out less fluffy. They'll basically be hearty crescent rolls.
Now. I swear by George Greenstein's Jewish Baker book, but he does not have a recipe for 100% whole wheat sourdough bread. I worked out that it's just like any other 100% whole wheat bread, but you let the sponge brew 24 hours and you let your bread dough rise 24 hours.
This part is the care and feeding of sourdough starter. When you take out starter for a batch, immediately feed the rest. Give it a day to bubble, then put a lid on the jar and put it in the fridge. Next time you want to bake, take it out a day in advance to warm up, and feed it before baking. Make sure to feed it at least once a week. You can stretch that to two weeks; longer than two weeks and you may want to start over. Think of your starter as a pet that needs regular care -- it doesn't eat as often as a dog or cat, but it does need to eat.
One last tip. You can brew starter because the yeast that is naturally on the grain survives the milling process. Grain also has naturally occurring bacteria colonies. While you brew your starter, it will develop a SCOBY, Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast. It's a thick layer on the top. This in turn can breed mold. If your SCOBY gets fuzzy, scoop it off and throw it away.
Because of the bacteria, NEVER eat starter raw. In fact NEVER eat raw flour products of any kind. Cookie dough or pasta can be a double threat because they have eggs in them and eggs are known to carry salmonella. Always COOK FLOUR PRODUCTS BEFORE CONSUMING.
Here's how to make your baked stuff last longer: hardtack. As long as you let it cool completely, and keep it in an airtight container, hardtack will keep for years. And since modern flour doesn't start out with weevil eggs in it, you don't have to worry about weevils in the hardtack like those poor sailors had centuries ago. What you must do, however, is prick it thickly with a fork all over, or it will puff up when you bake it. And when you eat it you must soak it in something because it gets hard enough to break your teeth. There are hardtack recipes on the web; none of them use yeast so you don't even need any starter to make it.
Now, how about those huge flour orders. You get 8 bags, 5 lbs each, to a case. 5 lbs of flour makes two batches of bread. Challah is an exception; you get 4 loaves to a recipe so 1 batch per bag*. So a case of flour will last you however long 16 batches of bread or rolls will last you, or 8 Shabbats for challah. A bag of flour has a shelf life of two years as long as you keep it cool and dry; after that its ability to rise goes downhill until it's basically powdered cement. So if you, like a lot of people in my town, are learning to bake from scratch, not from the box, don't be afraid to buy giant economy size quantities of flour. You have two years to use it up, and you can use it to make pasta or egg noodles, as well as tons of different snacks.
And just because you buy whole wheat flour doesn't mean you're limited to bread. Look on the web; almost anything you would make with white flour, you can make with whole wheat.
Emergency organizations have been telling people for decades to build stashes for emergency situations. Nobody ever imagined that stores would run out of flour. Lots of things are going on today that nobody ever imagined. Don't just plan for "the worst"; plan for "the unimaginable."
* Our foremothers didn't have domesticated yeast until about 150 years ago. They bought their "yeast" (starter) from the rebbetsin, probably on Wednesday, hit the market Thursday to get flour with the rest of their Shabbat provisions, let their sponge develop overnight, and proofed and baked on Friday. The sugar in the recipe helps the bread rise, but you'll have to put up with loaves that are a little flatter than with domestic yeast. But it's way better than going without.
