I always put my flour in clear plastic containers so I can see how much I have left. I also put bay leaves in with the flour, as the eggs/larval stages of a lot of grain pests are susceptible to their eugenol. [0,1]
For anything long term I pour the flour out onto long trays, let it reach 0°F/-18°C in my freezer and keeping it there for 3 days, then storing it in food safe 5-gallon buckets with bay leaves and oxygen absorbers, though some also use dry ice. [2]
these are great tips! i recently bought some of the buckets (pp), and I've been freezing all my grains and legumes upon purchase for a long time for exactly that reason
i'd be nervous about putting dry ice in a hermetically sealed container like a bucket
a thing i've noticed with storing food in plastic (pet) coke bottles is that they never seem to get beetles and that they tend to collapse a bit over the first year or so; i suspect that, even without a fe/nacl oxygen absorber, the food oxidizes enough to consume the oxygen initially present, which reduces the gas volume about 20 percent and kills any beetles initially present
a lot of my flour is in 6-liter pet water bottles with pp caps; none of it has evident beetles but i did freeze it first
The issue isn’t that bugs get in, but that bugs are already in. Weevils will lay their eggs in with the flour, which are impossible to sift out. Unless you bake them at 140°F/60°C, freeze them at 0°F/-18°C, use pesticides, or deprive them of oxygen, they’ll eventually hatch and eat your flour/grain.
Hah, for once, a benefit of having celiac, no wheat for me apparently means no weevils for me. I mix up a lot of gluten-free flour mix to substitute for all-purpose flour. It's a mix of way too many flours and starches (white rice, brown rice, sweet rice, potato starch, potato flour, ivory teff, tapioca starch, arrowroot flour) that I got from a blog many years ago, and haven't tried to slim down because it works great for me. Never had any bug issues; maybe specialty flours have better quality control.
I mix up 2 kilograms at a time: 500 grams sweet rice flour, 400 grams brown rice flour & potato starch, 200 grams ivory teff & arrowroot starch, 100 grams white rice flour, potato flour, & tapioca starch. The original recipe had almond flour instead of white rice flour, but I decided to make this nut-free (had some friends with nut allergies).
Nope - those are all bagged single ingredients I usually order online. Authentic Foods has most of them. The ivory teff is from Maskal. The arrowroot and tapioca might be called flour, starch, or powder - all the same thing. Potato starch and potato flour are 2 different things.
oh, so for example it's 100 grams white rice flour, 100 grams potato flour, and 100 grams tapioca starch, not 100 grams of a mix of the three? i guess that makes it add up to 2 kg
i have not had weevils in a number of years but I have recently had red flour beetles or confused flour beetles
they suck