Home baking is a great way to create delicious treats and mealtime staples, without the preservatives or price markups of commercial brands. It’s also just a lot of fun, whether you’re whipping up a batch of cupcakes or making bread loaves for the week. What isn’t fun is realizing that your pantry ingredients have been contaminated by little insects, right when you’re ready to bake.
Pantry moths are a common pest that like to eat the same food as you and I, which is why they’re drawn to flour and other dry foodstuffs. While they aren’t toxic to humans, a single moth can quickly become an infestation and no one wants to be dealing with insects in the home, let alone inside their baked goods. They can easily be brought into the house via packaging or self-serve bulk bins at the grocery store, so keeping a clean house isn’t necessarily going to keep them at bay.
What does seem to work? Bay leaves.
By simply placing a few bay leaves inside or next to your flour containers, you should be able to ward off any wayward pantry moths that are looking to lay eggs – without impacting the quality or condition of your ingredients.
Why you have pantry moths
As the name suggests, pantry moths are small moths that are often found inside pantries or cabinets full of dried goods. The formal name for this insect is the Indian meal moth and it likes to eat — and therefore infest — a range of foods, from flour and grains to baking chocolate and dried fruit. Herbs, spices, and even potpourri mixes aren’t safe from this moth, which is what makes your baking pantry such an attractive home.
Moths develop through a traditional lifecycle of eggs to larvae to adult moths. The eggs are whitish-gray and microscopic in size, measuring approximately 1-2 hundredths of an inch. Moths may lay hundreds of eggs at once. Once they hatch, the larvae spend several weeks eating and growing until they are ready to spin their cocoon and emerge as a moth. As larvae, the insects are still whitish in color with a brown head, but their size can make them difficult to see until they are fully grown. At full length, they reach about half an inch in size.
Pantry moths aren’t drawn to mold or decay, so an infestation doesn’t mean that your pantry is dirty. It’s much more likely that the creatures were brought in on the original packaging of something being kept in the pantry. Moths could have laid eggs on the surface of this packaging at any point in the production journey, including the final stop at the grocery store. These eggs can often be hard to spot at a glance and so you might not realize your box of flour is contaminated until it’s been sitting in your pantry for a few days.
Why are pantry moths a problem?
The larvae of the pantry moth are not poisonous to eat, but they can still spoil the food that they’ve infested. This is because the larvae spin silk to form their cocoons and this process can lead to clumps of silk in your flour that are covered in fecal matter, moth egg shells, and even the cast-off skins of the larvae. Unappetizing, to say the least.
One bit of good news is that pantry moths have no interest in fabrics or furniture, so an infestation shouldn’t cause any damage to the rest of the home. However, they can be hard to contain once the larvae have got established. Since the moth lays hundreds of eggs at a time, a single contaminated package can result in a large number of larvae and eventually a lot of moths. These insects are also able to chew through thinner plastics and paper, so they can easily transfer from one container of dried goods to another. Once a container has been contaminated, you really need to throw it out and replace it entirely – so the more packages affected, the more extensive and expensive this process will become.
Why bay leaves work
Treating baking ingredients for pests is tricky, since traditional pesticides are not safe to use around food and therefore you’ll be ruining the flour even if you do eradicate the moth problem.
This is why bay leaves are the perfect solution to combat pantry moths.
Bay leaves may be subtle in flavor to us but they contain eucalyptol, an essential oil that has been shown to repel a range of insects, such as mosquitos. The insects are deterred by the fragrance of the bay leaves and will therefore move elsewhere to lay their eggs, to avoid the discomfort of the scent. By placing bay leaves inside your flour containers, you protect them from potential infestation. You can even place a few loose leaves on top of or around the containers, for added effect.
Not only are bay leaves easily accessible at most grocery stores, but they are a safe and cost-effective alternative to chemical pesticides. Using bay leaves is also a very low-lift way to approach the problem: Each leaf can be used for several weeks at a time, meaning you only need to replace them sparingly.
The best way to use them
If possible, replace your current dry goods containers for glass or metal ones that can’t be penetrated by the moth larvae. This is useful as an added line of defence against infestation. Then, after filling the containers with their relevant product, place a couple of bay leaves inside each of the dried goods. This includes flour and sugar, but also cereals, pet food, teas, and any other dry food stuff that you commonly keep in the pantry.
You only need to use about 1-2 per container, but you can also tape one or two to the outsides of larger items as an added precaution. If your pantry is large, you might want to put a couple extra on the shelves themselves. Every 3-4 months, you’ll want to replace the bay leaves with fresh ones. One way to test if the leaves may be losing potency is to give them a sniff; while the scent is always quite subtle, if you can’t smell anything at all then it’s time to swap them out for a fresh batch of leaves.
This should be sufficient to keep pests at bay, but make sure to practice good habits as well to minimize the risk of infestation. You want to make the pantry as undesirable as possible, so don’t tempt pests with bits of food. This means keeping containers fully sealed and air-tight, as well as cleaning up any crumbs or spills as quickly as possible.
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