The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Do you save your bench flour?

clazar123's picture
clazar123

Do you save your bench flour?

It must be my Depression-era mother coming through but when I clean my bench flour ( I usually toss it) I feel like I am wasteful. I don't bake often enough and of enough variety to have a crumb bucket going to make delicious pastries, but sometimes the bench flour can amount to a few tablespoons when I make a succession of multiple loaves. Week after week, this could add up.

So what do people do with their bench flour? Save it for the next bake? Often there are shreds of dough in the bench scrapings- Is it wise to feed it to my sourdough? My counter is clean. Sometimes there is commercial yeast in the doughs, tho usually it is a natural levain. I'm curious to hear what goes on in other baker's kitchens.

Waste not-want not. That rings in my head as I scrape my counter.

grdresme's picture
grdresme

I work on clean benches as well. I usually collect the bench flour with a scraper, toss it through flour sieve over a my 'bench flour' container. It ensures no lumpy bits, and makes me feel good for not throwing stuff away that can be used. I also try to minimize the amount of flour I use on my bench. 

David Esq.'s picture
David Esq.

I expect that there is less than a tablespoon of flour that I have on the counter after a bake and I can't be bothered to sift it and reuse it, though sometimes if it is particularly clean without an dough bits, I will throw it back on top of the loaf in the proofing basket.

Other than that, I run the bench knife along the counter and push it all into a damp paper towel and be done with it.

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

I have moved on to slap and folds and stretch and folds I don;t have much if any bench flour except for pizza but ,when I did, I saved it for thickening gravy, soups and stews and feeding the SD.  Sourdough doesn't care if there is commercial yeast in it., as the commercial yeast can't live in an acidic SD culture for more than 2 feedings and thankfully, the LAB's eat dead yeast too.

Happy Baking 

dmsnyder's picture
dmsnyder

I dust my bench with a flour dredger. When cleaning the bench, I scrape it well with a bench knife and sift the scrapings back into the dredger through a fine strainer. I use the flour in the dredger for flouring fish fillets, crab cakes, etc. as well as dusting my board for bread. 

It's not a lot of flour each time, certainly, but I'm opposed in principle to unnecessary food waste.

David

balmagowry's picture
balmagowry

I always felt terribly wasteful throwing away all that bench flour, but I didn't feel as if I had much of a choice, because it generally had hard bits of dried dough mixed in with it, and I couldn't think of any way to use it that would be worth the effort of triage, sifting, storing. The solution, as it turns out, is to bake more and more, doing everything possible to improve one's dough handling technique. Recently I've made a conscious effort to minimize my use of bench flour, for all the obvious reasons including this one, and sure enough it's yielding good results. The more I bake, the less bench flour I use and the still-less is left over when I'm done. (Bonus: I'm also leaving a lot less dried doughy residue on the bench. And on my hands.) Now I can clean my bench with nary a twinge of conscience because there's hardly anything to throw away, AND I know I'm producing better bread.

OTOH, I still feel like I waste a lot of semolina or corn meal when I proof hearth loaves on the peel! Guess that'll be the next thing to work on.

ETA: @dmsnyder - I used to try to save it for flouring and breading, same as you. Problem is, I'd always FORGET that I had done so, or where I had put it, until it was too late and I'd already used fresh flour for whatever I was cooking. After a while I gave up contending against my own absence of mind. I know a losing battle when I see one. sigh

dmsnyder's picture
dmsnyder

Between flouring my kneading board and flouring things I am sautéing, I use my flour dredger probably 3 or 4 days each week. I don't have a problem remembering where I keep my "used" flour. 

BTW, I also use one of these for dusting my bannetons with an AP/Rice flour mix before putting loaves into them for proofing.

They look like this one:

David

 

balmagowry's picture
balmagowry

I used to use something a lot like that - kinda wish I still could. Unfortunately, however... well, wait a minute, what I was about to say was entirely hypocritical: I don't consider it AT ALL unfortunate that I live at the beach!!! ;-) It is, however, a fact of life here that certain compromises are necessary during at least half the year, and one of them is that every dry ingredient I work with has to be kept in an air-tight container and/or a warm dry spot. I do manage to maintain a big salt shaker by the stove, thanks to the latter's pilot light and a whole lot of rice, but sometimes even those forces (not to mention its supposedly moisture-proof cap) are not enough to keep it from clumping into a watery mass and then later resolving into Lot's wife. And of course as soon as you get beyond salt you're dealing not only with humidity but with rampant mold. So I spend MUCH of my post-baking time with the wrapping up, the sealing up, and the putting away. Any flour that sees less than daily use lives in the freezer; matches and salt and such live in the blessed brisker (I also use a couple of these to keep printer paper dry, unwarped, and usable), and there is much use of freshly-gasketed bail jars and the like to keep my powder dry as it were.

All part of the price of living in paradise; I pay it willingly.

dmsnyder's picture
dmsnyder

I know I left it around here somewhere! Wait! Wait! Nope, that's envy. Oh, well.

David

balmagowry's picture
balmagowry

Yes, I suffer.

Not.

verminiusrex's picture
verminiusrex

I use a similar shaker, although mine has fewer and large holes (because that is what I found at the store). It also has a plastic cap which is great for keeping it from becoming contaminated. A few shakes from about shoulder height over the work surface gives me the perfect coverage and I only put down as much flour as I need. 

gerhard's picture
gerhard

I toss it and don't feel bad about it.  In the old days you would throw the remnants of one dough or batter into the next, today there are concerns about allergens and good manufacturing practices dictate stopping that practice.  At home I follow the same practices.

Gerhard

hanseata's picture
hanseata

I bake so much, I usually leave the flour on the bench, it's gone fast, and only scrape off and discard parts that contain hard bits.

But when I'm baking my Pain a l'Ancienne, I have a lot of rye flour on the work surface, it is usually perfectly clean, and I take it off and reuse it.

Karin

balmagowry's picture
balmagowry

If I left flour on the bench between bakes I would soon have little white paw prints all over the kitchen!

David Esq.'s picture
David Esq.

I think I have the only cats in the world that have never been on the kitchen counter.  Tables, bookshelves, armoire, yes. But for some reason they have no desire to be on the counter, not even to drink out of the sink.

balmagowry's picture
balmagowry

It's a flock of flying pigs!

Seriously... are you SURE those are cats? It's not just a question of kitchen counters, you know. Encoded deep in the feline DNA is an inevitable attraction to ANY place where they aren't supposed to be.

Look more closely. I bet you'll find what you've got there is actually some other species in disguise. Miniature long-tailed sheep, perhaps.

(We won't even talk about the corresponding characteristic of dogs. I am daily thankful that mine can't actually reach the counter.)

MichaelLily's picture
MichaelLily

Flour is cheaper than dirt so just throw it away!  Sometimes I think "oh I should have used less" but for crying out loud it's 9 bucks for 25 pounds and I have that much money!

embth's picture
embth

I have an outdoor oven and make pizza often.  I save the re-useable bench flour from bread making (gathered from my inside kitchen counter), mix it with cornmeal and keep it in a plastic container for dusting pizza peels.  Any flour that seems moistened, lumpy, or otherwise "contaminated" is discarded.  Much of the flour/cornmeal mix from the peel remains on the oven floor and is swept into the fire once the pizza is removed from the oven.