Flour in the walk in? Tom?

[noreason]

Working with very limited space and I’m curious if anyone keeps their flour in the walk in? I’ve seen videos I believe of toms place where they keep their flour sacks in the walk in. What should I look out for when doing this?

 

[Tom_Lehmann]

The only good reasons that I can think of why flour would be kept in the walk-in cooler are:

1. Unable to control dough temperature and using the flour from the cooler might help BUT unless the flour is levt in the cooler for at least a week prior to use only the outer portion of the bag will be cooled, the rest of the bag (core) will be significantly warmer. Better to use chilled water or ice.
2. Flour use is very low and this is done in an attempt to prolong the life of the flour. Actually, most bagged flour sold today will last for about a full year without going bad.
3. The flour is whole-wheat flour and it makes a lot of sense to store whole-wheat flour in the cooler to prevent it from going rancid.
4. The only place where you have the physical space to store the flour is in the cooler. Gee, wouldn’t we all like to have this problem (excess cooler space).
   Outside of that I cannot come up with any valid or logical reason for storing your flour in the cooler. Remember, if the flour isn’t stored in the cooler for at least a week before it is used it will most likely raise havoc on your ability to effectively control finished dough temperature.
   Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

 

[noreason]

#4 is what I meant. Looking back on that, I wasn’t very clear… Sorry.

After putting up a second walk in cooler we now have the extra room inside one of the coolers, but we could use the room where we currently store our flour.

What I meant to ask was if there are any negatives to storing the flour in the cooler, or anything to look out for, not so much as if there are any benefits of doing so.

 

[Tom_Lehmann]

It goes back to #1. Flour is an excellent insulator so it takes approximately 7-days for a single bag of flour to equilibrate to cold room temperature, I say “a single bag” as in a bag placed by itself on a rack in the cold room, not stacked as we would normally store bags of flour, work that we did many years ago showed that a pallet of flour placed in a cold room took the better part of a full month before the entire pallet equilibrated to the cold room temperature. This is important to recognize since until the bag of flour is totally equilibrated to cold room temperature you can have a bag of flour that is cold on the outside and warm on the inside (core of the bag), and if you have a stack of flour it will be anybody’s guess what the temperature of the next bag of flour will be. Due to the temperature variation within the bag it is even very difficult to accurately measure the temperature of the flour within each bag.
Why is this so important? Because as I have said so many time before “without temperature control you cannot have effective dough management” and without effective dough management you cannot produce consistent performing doughs much less consistent quality pizzas.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor