Not sure about the rest of the world but here in the greater New York City area there is no flour to be found…
I did manage to get a 5 pound bag of bread flour… I know it is not interchangeable with all purpose flour and I guess this is not the time to be making pate feuilletée, but can i use it for cookies? for quick breads? any modifications i should be making to accommodate it?
thanks!
Use 1:1 I made choc chip cookies with bread flour, nice chewy texture without under baking. If you enjoy a chewy cookie that is.
Yes, you can substitute bread flour for AP flour in almost all recipes. If there is a lot of moisture in the recipe just be conscious of over-mixing which may over develop the gluten. But for something like a cookie where there is actually a lot of fat compared to water, you should be fine. The differences I would expect to be minor.
Bake away!
If you don’t believe me 
(it is the internet after all)
My partner is the baker of the couple. She’s been working in the opposite direction to Richard - making bread with plain flour instead of bread flour. It’s worked OK as far as I can tell. This should be a temporary issue as we’ve just done a supermarket home delivery order and bread flour was back in stock - although whether it is still in stock on Tuesday when the delivery is due, is anyone’s guess.
I have tried, total failure with bread flour.
I’m not sure where you are - NYC area is pretty big - but as of 3/28 I’m having no problems finding flour in the smaller chains such as Key or Associated. I steer way clear of TJ’s and Whole Foods - they are madhouses.
Nor are they price gouging. Try them if they are in your area.
How about cutting the flour w/cornstarch?
In what application or recipe?
That’s awfully broad… Come to Southeast Brooklyn, We Have Flour.
It disappeared from Stop & Shop’s shelves during the first week of The Panic, but it’s been trickling back in (and not selling out immediately, like TP and PT). and from what little I’ve seen (haven’t exactly been doing my usual browse-all-the-stores routine lately 
) smaller stores either weren’t totally stripped bare, or have started getting it back again… But then, my neighborhood/greater neighborhood (in-between Midwood and Sheepshead Bay) leans toward a “lower middle class”/immigrant demographic, and there is usually lots (and lots) of flour of all sorts in stores around here. Way more as a percentage of total shelf space than it was on Manhattan store shelves, even twenty years ago, and I suspect that percentage has dropped even futher since I moved back out to Brooklyn ~ 5 years ago…
