Can’t find flour or yeast for love or money anywhere local, and Amazon is sold out of all reasonably priced loaf tins. Is everyone making their own bread during lockdown now? Apparently I won’t be because I’ve missed the boat on getting the necessary in time 
At least I can still buy bread.
If anyone here is making their own bread, please share pictures if you can so I can at least experience some vicarious baking joy 
I’m just buying bread as usual
We are buying bread but I saw a thing on buzzfeed about making your own yeast (aka a sourdough starter). You also don’t necessarily need a loaf tin. I think you can make a cob loaf on a baking tray?
Supermarkets are back to normal for us too so no real shortage of anything.
Same here. My local Waitrose had just about everything today and so did Tesco a couple of days ago. I would imagine the entire chain will be caught up in the coming week.
I’m glad that I wasn’t pressured into panic buying now. Especially after seeing photos online of peoples wheely bins full of unopened outdated products. What a waste 
I read this as “banking during lockdown” so was initially most confused by the content.
Ah that’s true. It’s mainly the lack of flour and yeast that’s the barrier at the moment, but! Also when baking without a mould I do worry I’ll end up with a spreading, formless monster…
I think the message I’m getting here is that my local Tesco is rubbish. It’s a normal Tesco (not local, not superstore) but I think perhaps it’s slightly too small for its catchment area.
I have to go to work tomorrow to perform building and safety checks, so I might pop in to Waitrose while I’m there if it seems safe to do so.
Sorry about that. I nearly put ‘bread’ after ‘baking’, but thought that might be too exclusionary if anyone wanted to share their cakes or biscuits 
No harm done! I actually bought some baking products in my weekly shop earlier - but no baking powder to be seen in Lidl. I assume they stock it but was just sold out. Good stock of eggs, bread flour, self-raising / plain though. (And no in store bakery, which made me sad).
Ahh sourdough time.
About 18 months ago I properly got into sourdough making, but stopped when I broke my oven…
Since lockdown I’ve been trying to get a starter up and going again - suprisingly harder than last time for some reason. Fortunately, I have some flour, and my local ‘organic’ shop is selling flour in a BYO-container style, so I’ve got a little bit (seriously though, check out those sorts of shops, or cash and carries, good chance of flour there).
For anyone who wants to get a sourdough starter going - basic recipe:
Day 1:
Day 2, onwards
In about 7-10 days of doing this, you should be getting decent activity - the start should almost double in size.
Once it starts doubling, you can use it to bake.
Heres a nice recipe - but it assumes you have a starter to use to ‘prime the pot’ as it were:
Can’t beat freshly made bread. It’s something I really should start doing… 
Turns out it was boredpanda not buzzfeed. Here’s the post: https://www.boredpanda.com/yeast-shortage-life-hack/
There’s also a very brief mention of using oats to instead of flour, but maybe a step too far if this is your first attempt at bread making.
I make them with chopped up dried apricots and raisins so I can pretend they’re healthy
Made rocky road today. Didn’t let the marshmallows melt for long enough but still delicious
Lockdown loaves.
Supermarkets were all out of flour, but found some in one of the whole food shops - these are a mix of white wheat flour & spelt. I use a sponge starter so yeast goes a long, long way.
A really interesting thread - and good to look at. However, the nimble-eyed amongst you will have noticed this…
Surely, @BritishLibrary, you’re going to complete that story? 
Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you hanging like that…!
So to get a really well risen dough and crispy bubbly exterior, you need to get steam in your oven and loaf. To get the bread to rise really well, and have the “ear” you see on a loaf, you start with a higher hydration loaf (the water turns to steam which helps the rise).
For the exterior part, to get a crust like this, you can create a steamy environment in your oven (I’m sure you see where this is going…).
I read all the blogs and techniques and what not - my approach ended up as; filling a cast iron pan with bbq lava rocks, which you heat up for a couple of hours during the proofing steps, and a pan with damp teatowels, all in the bottom of my oven.
What you need to do in the 60 second window you have to put your loaf in is:
Turn out, on my (old) (and cheap) oven, that breaks the thermostat and randomly turns the oven off for the duration of the bake, thus negating the impact of your steamy oven making technique…
Replaced the oven, but have not tried said technique since!
