Monday, April 6, 2009

Flour! Flour! Flour!

Inspired by this post by FishMama and this post @ TheFrugalGirl I decided to seriously look into flour prices in my local ads. Both of them discussed stocking up on flour because of the good prices right now. They 5 lbs of flour for just $1.50 - and it wasn't at Kroger! I was mildly interested when I read FishMama's post, but Frugal Girl is more local -- she got hers at Weis. So that definitely intrigued me. We have a Weis about 20 minutes away. That's doable, since I'll probably be up there on Tuesday.

Then I checked my price book, the cheapest I've seen whole wheat flour since last may was $2.19, and that was for the store brand. So I looked into the deals a bit more, Shoppers has the best price for my local stores, so I decided they were my best option. Today I went back to Shoppers and took advantage of their $1.89/5 lbs sale.

So, here's the deal, I bought 18 bags - 90 pounds of flour!
All this flour cost me $29.22.
In addition to the flour sale, I bought one reusable bag @ $0.89, and I had two Catalina "On Your Next Order" Coupons that reduced the final out-of-pocket. That leaves me with about $4.00 to spend for the rest of the week! I think it'll be enough to cover milk and eggs, since I'm already pretty well stocked.

I really debated about buying this much flour. Would I really use all this? I don't have a lot of room in my grocery budget this week. I've been doing a lot more from scratch baking and cooking in the last several months. And, since all the Gold Medal flour was on sale I could get the best price on bread flour and whole wheat flour as well as unbleached flour. I remembered reading at TheFrugalGirl that flour isn't likely to be on a good sale again until Thanksgiving. That's 8 months of baking, waffles, pancakes, and (maybe) even bread. With this much bread flour to work with I might actually learn to make bread instead of bricks? I finally decided to go for it.

Now ,I've completely eliminated and rewritten one whole page in my price book. Two pages worth of notes has been crossed out and rewritten with one line!

2 comments:

Stephanie said...

Ok I missed the whole flour deal..thanks so much for sharing it! I am off to check the links and see about stocking up!

The Prudent Homemaker said...

Do you have any food grade buckets? You can store your flour in those until you are ready you use them, keeping bugs and rodents out of your bags.

I have some recipes for French Bread and Rosemary Olive Oil bread that you can try that use the bread flour. They also don't require a bread pan--just a cookie sheet.

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