Little Flour is a quirky little microbakery in St. Louis, MO. We exist solely to raise funds which provide cooking and baking classes for kids in underserved communities in our City. 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” with a week’s worth of toasting bread and baguettes and treats to our subscribers on Friday afternoons. For larger events we do “Flour Boxes” with sandwich rolls or tarts made for a crowd. 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 kids in underserved communities 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.
Update 6/27/15: 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, and 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 hand made in very small batches 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 occasional 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 something you find here might inspire you to bake a little extra this week and share it with someone near you. 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!
Another 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!
And Yet More! 1/20/16: Be on the lookout this year for more Little Flour baking classes. As our oven capacity holds production steady, we’ll be expanding our classes for kids and adults this spring. Keep an eye out for updates!
Even More Exciting: In the Summer of 2017 The Operation Food Search School of Cooking and Sharing will be opening its doors and Little Flour will be a part of the team making healthy baking education available to families throughout St. Louis, check it out here!
Spring 2020: As much as I’ve enjoyed baking and selling flour baskets to raise funds for our kids baking program, there are no flour basket subscriptions or special orders available right now. Please consider a donation to Haven Street or Bridge Bread if you are interested in efforts to feed hungry people in St. Louis right now.