re: The things you can't buy because of Covid.

Got these of FB marketplace for free today. Added air and took off. Both in perfect condition

Someone tell me anywhere I can get a women's cruiser bicycle. I haven't seen one in weeks.

I made my own wild yeast. Been
Cranking out bread.

Just let flour and water sit three days, then start adding flour and water to it. On fifth day start discarding half and replacing the volume discarded with equal parts flour and water. Between day 7 and 9 it should be ready.

Ive been mailing out yeast I dried.
I also bought a starter from San fransico which makes better bread than my starter.
Top one is SF starter others my starter

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We have yet to find yeast for bread.

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Yeast is the simplest thing in the world to culture on your own and make a sourdough starter using the yeast that naturally floats around your kitchen. After all, we've been making bread for 10,000 years. It can't be that complicated. Yeast, water, flour, salt. Oh, about the water. Never ever EVER use water straight out of the tap if your water is chlorinated. Yeast is a single celled organism and chlorine will murder the frick out of single celled organisms. Chlorine's penchant for unicellar genocide is kind of exactly why we put it in the water. Let water sit at least overnight, uncovered, before you use it and most of the chlorine will just migrate out of the water into the air. Just fill up a big glass or a pitcher and put it on your counter ahead of time. Overnight is good. A full day is better. Using distilled water is best to be sure, but that's not always practical. As I mentioned earlier, though, we've been doing this for 10,000 years, so they didn't have filtered and distilled water back then, either. Just don't kill the wee beasties by exposing them to treated water straight out of the tap, okay?

Make a mix of half flour and half water, by volume. Cover it with a clean towel held on with a rubber band (to keep dust and bugs out) and then let it sit on your counter. The next day, stir it up good and pour half of it down the drain and then fill it back up with a 50/50 flour/water mixture and stir it up good again. Put a clean towel back on the container. Yeast is alive and like any living thing you share your house with, you have to keep feeding it if you want it to stay living. This is what pouring half away and refilling is all about. It helps limit the dead yeast and byproducts because you're throwing some of that away every time you feed and replacing it with clean water and flour. So, if you put a half cup of flour and a half cup of water in on the first day, you'd pour a half cup out the second day and add back a quarter cup of flour and a quarter cup of water and stir it all up and let it sit for another day. To avoid killing your starter, it's a good habit to refill that glass of water and set it aside right after you feed your yeast. Then, when you go to feed it the next day, you'll have had a full 24 hours for the chlorine to leave the water.

Make sure to put it in a container that's three or four times the volume of the mixture because it will bubble and froth and rise. You're culturing yeast and yeast is alive and farts gases when it eats, remember?

After 5 to 7 or so days of feeding, you'll have this gloop in the container and you stash that in your fridge. It's important to let it go that long before chilling it or using it because the yeast needs time to really colonize that starter and then come to a happy medium with all the other microorganisms that are colonizing your sourdough starter. Everything in your kitchen that can live in that starter will and what lives in it the first day will not be the same mixture that lives in it once it's matured and has reached a stable equilibrium. This particular mix of microorganisms is going to be what makes your bread made in your kitchen have its own distinctive flavor and the 5-7 days on the counter with constant feeding helps get to this point. For instance, one of the microorganisms that you will be giving a home to will almost certainly be one of the strains of Lactobacillus. Where yeast eats sugar and oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and alcohol, Lactobacillus will eat sugar anaerobically and produce lactic acid. These are the same bacteria that give fermented pickles their tart flavor. So, while the yeasts in your culture will be responsible for rising your bread, the Lactobacillus will give it that sourdough tartness. This is how the exact mixture and species that grown in your kitchen will determine what lives in your starter and your bread's flavor.

Once it goes in the fridge, then you only need to do the "pour half and refill" routine to feed the starter once a week to keep your starter well fed. The cold puts the yeast on slo-mo. When you feed the starter, leave it on the counter an hour or two before you put it back in the fridge to give the yeast a little time to warm up a bit and begin chewing on their new food before you put it back in the fridge. You don't even have to refrigerate it if you don't want to, but you'll have to continue to feed it every day instead of once a week if you don't chill it.

When you want bread, feed the starter with a cup of half flour and half water about 12 hours before you want to make bread. This'll wake it up and give it some fresh food to get a head start on replicating and getting those bubbles going before you relocate it into your dough.

Experiment with how much of the starter you need in your recipe. The yeast WILL rise, eventually, but if you don't use enough starter, it'll take a while to kick off. If you use too much, it'll blow up sooner than you want and you may end up with giant bubbles in your bread. Your starter will be particular to you and your house, so there's no definite way to say how much you'll need. It depends on the strain of yeast you culture, how active it is, how many spores are in your particular culture, etc. you'll just have to experiment. When you use some of the starter, don't use it all. You want to have a good bit left. You're gonna feed that more flour and water to make more starter for your next loaf!

If it looks like this, you're doing it right.


ETA: Holy wall of text. But, yeast is serious business. Bread and beer. It'll keep your belly full and get you drunk!

Prostitutes.

In grocery stores Ive been going to most things are starting to get easier to find. TP, handsoap, and clorox wipes still a rarity, but most other stuff has been getting replenished faster.
Nola area.

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I had to go all the way to bucktown for regular flour

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Per my wife and her facebook, apparently all the Karens are making their own bread from scratch.

Works for me. Bread aisle been mostly full for about 2 weeks now.

I've done online ordering and curbside pickup at my local grocery store for over 15 years now. I used to be able to schedule a pick up same day with 3 hr lead time or next day. Now I'm lucky to get a spot 8 to 10 days out. Last week I couldn't get: yogurt, paper goods,cleaning products, salad, bread, and several other things. This week I couldn't get chocolate chops to make cookies, paper goods, cleaning products, but I got yogurt and salad! Many of the items I ordered I had to accept substitutions--for instance I couldn't get my brand of pasta sauce, mustard, and several other things.