What If There Was A Wheat Flour Shortage?

I’ve had some conversations with people recently who, like me, have been watching the situation in Ukraine and wondered about the impact on our supply of wheat.

Ukraine provides 10% of the world’s wheat. With the war, that supply is in question and add the 17% that normally comes from Russia and we’ve got the making of some serious shortages.

The Canadian prairies had a drought last year reduced wheat production by 35% with an uncertain outlook for this year’s harvest.

With prices of everything going up, it can make you wonder how to be sure you can access the basics of life. Bread is one of those basics and wheat is a primary ingredient in most breads. But it doesn’t have to be. There are other ways.

You can make flour out of many foods.

If you recall some time ago I talked about getting a dehydrator and had dehyrated many vegetables for the winter:

• tomatoes
• carrots
• onions
• red pepper
• mushrooms
• garlic
• potatoes

Using Potatoes For Flour

Yes, even potatoes. When good specials came on I would get some, give them a boil, mash them and put them on the dehyrator. The dried potatoes could then be broken into bits and stored to be used for mashed potatoes or even thickners for soups and stews.

Did you know, with a simple, inexpensive coffee grinder you can turn those potato flakes into potato flour. There are lots of recipes around for using potato flour, especially for making gluten free breads. I found this page with nine potato flour recipes.

Chickpea Flour

I’ve turned chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans) into flour. My sister sent me a recipe recently for making tofu with chickpea flour instead of soy. All I needed to do was grind dried chickpeas into flour.

Yes, you can make bread from chickpeas

Pea Powder

Split green peas that you can pick up so inexpensively in the store can be ground into pea flour which is rich in protein.

Yes, once again the coffee grinder will do the job. If you need to do any quantity you can likely use a decent blender, have never had to do much at a time.

You can put pea powder into baked goods. Use properly it can improve the crumb of some of the other types of bread. You can make a basic protein bread with it.

Oatmeal

Let’s circle back to oatmeal. Yes, that simple grain we know for porridge. You can grind it into flour and use them to make breads. Oat bread is one of my favourite breads yet it’s rare to find in the stores these days.

Here’s one recipe for oat bread but there are plenty of them if you do a search.

One caution here. While oatmeal doesn’t have gluten in naturally, it can often become cross contaminated with wheat during growing. If you gluten free is important to you, make sure oats are certified gluten-free.

Don’t Stop With These

I’ve scratched the surface on how to make breads in particular should the price of wheat go so high that your usual breads become too expensive to buy or even make.

You’ll find many of the wheat free foods can be very tasty and higher in nutritional value than what we’ve been picking up at the store.

HEADER Image from Pixabay.com

Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.

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