Weevils in flour

Weeeeeeeeeevils!

Most flour has weevil eggs in but it depends how quick you use it as to whether you get to the beetle stage.

Brave Hitchers just sieve them out and view any they don't catch as extra protein.

Squeamish ones bin everything in the kitchen and fumigate the house.

They won't hurt you either way.

Extra protein - good ?

Urgh, I hate the creepy little fuckers. They get in everywhere (they seem to like sugar too). I got a dodgy bag of flour from sainsburys and they got into everything in my whole larder. I ended up throughing everything away.

They are probably harmless but I couldn't eat the cake I put int the oven before noticing them because I kept thinking of the creepy buggers wriggling around and I felt guilty for baking them to death.

I'm one of the just-sieve-them-out brigade.

I don't think i've ever seen one

maybe i've been baking them into my smarties cookies for years? ?

I opened a brand new packet of flour a couple of weeks ago and it had some in. I was only baking cookies for a friend so just carried on - I wasn't going out to buy another bag.

Moral of the story - don't ask me to bake!!! ?

I'm in the chuck it brigade, they also got into my sugar

I always check the flour for weevils before I use it. I know they probably don't do any harm but I can't stomach the thought of cooking with weevil-infested food. I'm squeamish like that. I end up chucking all the flour and other dried ingredients too and clean out the cupboards with a bleach solution. Don't know if it has any effect but it makes me feel better. ?

My mum hangs a bunch of dried herbs (bay leaf, I think) in her baking cupboard to keep weevils and other bugs at bay but she tends to get through flour quickly enough that weevils don't get time to put in an appearance anyway so it might just be an old wives' tale.

? I gave my cake to the neighbours kids. It seemed a shame to waste it.

On a related note, I once posted on here about making coffee for builders all week and then finding what seemed like cobwebs in the jar. Rather than tell them I used the coffee which seemed the least cobwebby and threw the last bit out. Did them no harm (and it turned out they weren't cobwebs anyway so I'm glad I didn't chuck the whole thing).

No Hitcher will ever come to mine for dinner now, will they? ?

If they are just in the flour I sieve it anyway so I get the little sods out but had a nasty infestation a few years ago when I was doing some Christmas baking so had loads of dry ingredients which they got in and they were crawling over the shelves so I binned and bleached everything. I then went over to Sainsbury to buy more ingredients and saw a few crawling over their shelves so I went elsewhere!

Well I was after I seived the flour that I noticed one on the top of the flour... ,aybe my seive isn't fine enough.

Now feel slightly guilty at the thought of potentially cooking them alive mwuh hah hah...

Having never heard of weevils I had a scoot about Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weevil

I wouldn't eat them after reading the above

H's mum has had them for years, can't get rid of them, but thats coz she's a lazy caaah and can't be bothered to clean and disinfect properly

But weevils are HUGE. Your sieve must be all hole and no mesh

Now I am unsure after reading that...

My sieve:

I get these when I haven't used the flour for a while are they're teeny tiny things. I wouldn't be able to sieve them out. I try and put all my flour in glass sealed containers which seems to sort it.

They're called pscoids.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ip/bryanturner/other/home_psocids.html

I have to say I have always binned flour with weevils in - they creep me out.

I now keep all of my flour in rubber sealed jars - then if I find any in my flour I can just bin the contents of that jar and know they haven't got into everything!

BTW I've never seen a weevil in flour, just pscoids.

So are they different to weevils then?

And yep our kicthen is always full of condensation ☹️ Guess I am going to have to chuck stuff out?

I've never seen any kind of creepy crawly in any of my flour and I buy the basics range. I bet I've eaten them without realising ?

We had an infestation a few years ago and they got everwhere - seemingly into sealed jars too - our ones favoured pasta, particularly spaghetti, and Beef Oxo cubes for some reason...... Even now I open them with caution.

Haven't seen any now for ages, but will be breaking out the baking stuff soon for Christmas so will see.....

Pitt...when we had this a couple of weeks ago we threw open packets out, but kepts the sealed ones. Also cleaned all the cups in the cupboards and the other bits and pieces.

It was a sealed bag it was in ☹️

How big was it? It's possible that if they're in the cracks of the bag then when you open the bag they might have fallen in.