Wait, flour goes bad?
Indeed, and faster than you might think.
What is the shelf life of flour?
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Depending on how they’re stored, whole-wheat flours will keep for three months to a year.
Most will keep for three to six months, depending on storage.
How can you tell if flour has gone bad?
And, as discussed, how you store your flour will affect its shelf life.
The best approach is to check the flour yourself, and you should start by looking at it.
Smell is another great test.
Wheat-based flours should smell neutral or almost not at all, but you may detect a subtle wheat aroma.
Nut-based flours will smell nutty.
If flour smells unpleasant in any waysour, moldy, musty, bitterit’s gone bad.
To learn the signs of spoiled flour, it’s good to start paying more attention to fresh flour.
What happens if you use flour that’s gone bad or expired?
Maybe you tossed the bag with the best by-date or can’t tell if it smells sour.
Rest assured that, most of the time, using expired flour will not make you sick.
The more likely result of using expired flour is that it will affect your baking.
If the flour has a bad flavor, it may come through in your cakes orquick breads.
One flour to be particularly careful with is self-rising flour.
The bugs will die in the oven, and you may not even notice them.
