July flour baskets are filled with sourdough baguettes, whole grain seeded baguettes, oatmeal raisin bread for breakfast toast and sandwich rolls made just like the bread we are making in our Kids Baking for Good classes this month. We’ve already discovered they make the best BLT sandwiches ever, so hit the farmer’s market for your bacon and tomatoes and enjoy! Happy summer everyone!!
Archives for June 2015
Can we buy bread??
Wow! We’ve been overwhelmed by the support we’ve received since the Little Flour concept took root earlier this spring, and by how many of you have asked to buy our bread and support our work with hungry kids in St. Louis. All that support has led to a couple logistical questions that we need to answer. For those of you asking to buy our bread online, or asking if you can buy it in any local stores, the answer is regrettably no. At least not in this chapter of life. Little Flour is a “cottage food production operation” in Missouri which means we only bake cookies, cakes, bread (especially bread!), pastries, pies, and other “non potentially hazardous” (who’d want those anyway?!?) food items that we sell ourselves. We bake them right here in our own home kitchen, which is thoroughly inspected for cleanliness by our lead baker’s mother and mother-in-law before placing their breakfast toast orders each month, but is not inspected by the actual health department. As a result, according to Missouri law, we can’t ship to you or open our own storefront no matter how much we appreciate your requests! And that’s actually ok with us. Tempting and flattering as the offers to sell more bread have been, our primary goal was never to sell more bread. We’re all about feeding kids around here. And our capacity is limited. The bread we sell locally is very small batch and sold entirely like an old school bake sale. Our supporters pick up their bread face-to-face on Friday afternoons, maybe share a beverage and a bit of conversation in the process, and write their checks directly to the local non-profits we support. We do an occassional pop-up bake sale around town to raise money for these organizations working to end hunger, especially hunger among youth and kids, and you can follow us on Instagram (@littleflourmicrobakery) if you’d like to know where to find us. Funds raised are earmarked by the agencies to buy ingredients for our baking classes and to make healthy baked goods on site for kids that are hungry in our city. If we spent too much time and oven capacity making bread to sell, we’d have no capacity left to feed the kids we set out to serve. The good news is that anyone who loves to bake can do the same thing in their own neighborhood, and we certainly hope that you’ll give it a try. We’ll keep sharing our stories and recipes and would love to hear from you about the people you’re baking for in your community too!
Baking for Good!
We are so thrilled to have the support of King Arthur Flour for a series of summer baking classes at our drop-in center for food insecure youth. The Learn Bake Share program was designed to teach kids to bake and also to share. Normally kids learn to bake bread at school and then take home a bag of great ingredients and a recipe book courtesy of King Arthur Flour. At home they bake two loaves of bread, one to share with their family and another to share with a local agency working to meet the needs of food insecure families in the community. In our case, we will be teaching the baking class at the center and baking the bread there as well. The kids will eat the fresh bread right out of the oven the afternoon of the class, but will also bake enough to provide the bread for the community meal on Friday afternoon. Kids baking for kids! The Bake for Good Kids Bread Recipe is healthy and fool proof! We’re making a batch in our kitchen today to make sure we have all our supplies in order, and it smells warm and delicious already. Stay tuned for details on the classes and recipes, but we wanted to say thanks to our friends at King Arthur for the donation of flour, yeast, books and equipment and also to our Little Flour supporters for donating additional kitchen supplies (and all the meat and cheese to turn that bread into sandwiches on Friday!) to get the program launched this summer!
Update: If you would like to make the bread at home or for kids in your neighborhood, here is the recipe…
What is a microbakery?
Little Flour is a quirky midwestern microbakery. That means we aren’t trying to bake a lot of bread for a lot of people. We’re just doing our own small thing with a lot of love. Breakfast toast. Cookies that don’t come from a box. Sourdough baguettes fresh from the oven on Friday night. Breads and sweets that make people healthy and happy. We offer “Flour Baskets” filled with a week’s worth of toasting bread and baguettes and treats to our subscribers on Friday afternoons. We bake for drop in centers and shelters where people are hungry not just for good homemade bread, but also for the hope and joy that bread can bring when shared around a table. We bake occassionally as a “pop-up” fundraiser for those organizations working to end hunger in our little corner of the world. We teach bread baking and basic cooking skills to a lot of the folks we meet along the way, and wherever possible adovocate on behalf of the hungry and those who seek to feed them well. This site is a place for our supporters to find out what we are baking for our pop-up bake sales and Flour Baskets. And it is a response to requests that we share some of our recipes so they can be recreated at home and shared by others. Along the way we might talk about what inspires us. It’s a love of cooking to be sure. And eating. But it’s mostly about feeding. Feeding the people gathered around our own tables and around tables throughout our community. If you stumbled upon us from another neighborhoood, welcome. We hope something you find here might inspire you to bake a little extra this week and share it with someone near you.
Update 9/8/15: The subscription list for the 2015-2016 season is now full, but please stay in touch for information on pop-up bake sales! Thanks to our loyal subscribers for funding a full school year of baking classes for hungry kids!