Where to Buy Flour in Boston for Making Bread & Sourdough Starters - Quarantine Baking
Where to buy flour in Boston
As our community continues navigate these uncertain times, there are two things that we have learned.
1) The South End is an incredibly strong & supportive community
2) People love baking bread in quarantine. Flour has never been more in demand than it is now.
We have short term furnished rentals in the heart of South End, Boston. We are your South End guest house for when family and friends visit. We are also avid foodies and bakers so naturally, we wanted to join the baking craze and buy some flour. Ever since quarantine started, demand for flour has gone up drastically and supply has gone down. And so our journey began to seek out local Boston stores selling flour to make varieties of bread and a sourdough starter. We can’t promise that these stores still have the flour in stock, but they have a better chance of having them. We suggest calling them in advance to confirm if they have the flour or not. Also, you can buy already made sourdough starter, however we didn’t come across any Boston stores selling it the time.
Skip to Boston stores selling flour:
Homemade sourdough bread
“Despite all the mysticism and lore about creating the concoction, when broken down, it’s merely a naturally fermenting mixture of flour and water.”
After doing extensive sourdough recipe research, we settled on a sourdough starter from award winning blog The Perfect Loaf. This was the most detailed sourdough guide that we found - Maurizo provides thorough information on all things sourdough starter and sourdough bread related, even breaking down step by step guides with photo visuals. His sourdough starter recipe will be ready after 7 or so days for use. We highly recommend. You don’t need a professional oven to make fantastic bread, your apartment oven will work excellently.
Our sourdough starter rising. A rubberband helps keep track of how much it has risen throughout the day.
His sourdough starter recipe requires all-purpose flour and rye flour. We tracked the flours down in the South End all within 5 minutes walking distance from The Upton. If you can’t find rye flour, whole wheat works too, but it ferments a little slower and may be more challenging to work with for a starter beginner.
South End stores selling/recently sold all purpose flour:
Formaggio offers contact-less curb-side pickup. Call in advance or place an order online.
South End stores selling/recently sold rye flour & whole wheat flour:
We paid over the phone to make store contact minimal.
Clearflour Bakery (Brookline)
Clearflour offers contact-less ingredient pickups. Schedule and place an order online.
Siena Farms’ rye & wholewheat flour was stone-ground from a farm in Maine. The rye was milled on March 30th - they got it to the South End quick! The rye flour was extremely fresh and all of the nutrients helped our starter rise on a consistent schedule easily & quickly. Tip: stone-milled flour is supposed to be better than commercially ground flour (more nutrients are retained in the process).
While picking up some extra rye flour from Clearflour Bakery through a scheduled contact-less pickup, we grabbed one of their awesome shirts too. The Perfect Loaf blog recommends buying rice flour to help prevent the dough from sticking, so we tracked some down right near our apartments.
Our South End rice flour source was Foodie’s
11 days after starting our starter, we made finally made Maurizo’s weekday sourdough bread recipe. Per his advice, we knew the starter was ready to make bread when it peaked in height and then begun to collapse around the same time frame everyday. Throughout the 11 days, we kept an eye on our starter and adjusted our water temperature to balance out storing it in a cool place, as opposed to warm. Maurizo emphasizes the importance of understanding the factors that impact starter growth and then observing & adjusting your starter based on them. The sourdough bread recipe that we chose requires bread flour, which we easily got through a scheduled contact-less curbside pickup at Formaggio in the South End, Boston. We also bought some of their fantastic triple creme to pair with the bread.
ingredients for the starter (read here):
whole grain rye flour
all-purpose flour
water
ingredients for the weekday sourdough bread (read here):
bread flour
whole wheat flour
water (we reduced the water by 10% to make the dough easier to handle)
salt
levain (made from the starter. The Perfect Loaf explains this in detail)
Tracking down all of the flour to make sourdough was no easy feat, but it was worth it. We safely supported local businesses while enjoying some of the best bread we’ve ever eaten. In addition to flour, we also needed a dutch oven to make the bread. We used a cast iron with a lid. Dutch ovens retain heat very well and baking the bread for a portion of time with the lid on keeps the moisture & steam from the dough inside of the pot. This essentially keeps the bread interior super soft while getting the crust browned and perfectly crunchy. If you don’t have a dutch oven, you can use any deep pot that is oven safe and then lay a baking pan directly on top of it as if it were a lid.
List of Boston stores selling flour:
We recommend calling these stores in advance to confirm that they are in stock. We found that these stores were stocked with different flour varieties at different times throughout the past weeks. Fortunately, most of these stores are in the South End, Boston, within a 10 minute walking radius of each other and The Upton. Big shout out to everyone who has helped us update this list with more Boston spots!
Formaggio
Formaggio Kitchen South End
268 Shawmut Ave
Boston, MA 02118
bread flour
unbleached all-purpose flour
instant yeast (for baking other breads, like challah)
Elmendorf Baking Supplies
594 Cambridge St
Cambridge, MA 02141
accepting phone orders for flours on Wednesdays & Fridays
Broadway Marketplace
468 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02138
all-purpose flour
Flour Bakery
various Boston locations
offering pickup & delivery online orders for all-purpose flour, bread flour, yeast & sugar
Star Market
1065 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
all-purpose flour (NOT in the flour aisle, was in a King Arthur display near international section)
Hi-Rise Bread Company
208 Concord Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
accepting online & phone orders for flour & yeast varieties, curbside pickup
South End Food Emporium
469 Columbus Ave
Boston, MA 02116
(617) 536-7172
bread flour
Kiki’s Market
236 Faneuil St
Brighton, MA 02135
bread flour
Happy Market
128 South St
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
all-purpose flour & yeast
Please let us know if you have found flour anywhere else and we will update our list!
We didn’t stop at just a sourdough starter. We used the flours for fresh tortillas, focaccia bread, challah bread, Clearflour-inspired fougasse bread, two types of corn bread, Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, tagliatelle, and apple pie. Next up is pita bread. Below are the recipes that we researched extensively, used, and totally endorse.
Recipe Notes:
Cut the salt in Saltie’s focaccia bread recipe in half, double the olive oil, and let the dough sit out of the fridge for 45+ minutes before baking
For beginner bakers: For the sourdough recipes & Jim Lahey’s no knead dough, cover the bowl that you store dough inside with parchment paper before putting the dough inside of it. Eventually, you will bake the dough in a dutch oven on top of parchment paper, and this way, you can easily lift the dough up with the parchment paper and transfer it directly inside of your dutch oven. The dough is very hydrated and I have found it very sticky and difficult to manage at times. This technique prevents having to manually deal with sticky dough and makes the transition to the oven seamless. The parchment paper might slightly adjust the shape of the bread due to the paper bunching around the edges in some places, but the pain that I’ve experienced from ruining a loaf due to not being able to handle sticky dough isn’t worth it if you ask me. Once you get more comfortable, you can ditch the parchment paper all together!
If you’re still hungry for more, check out our favorite South End restaurants. Focaccia would also pair perfectly with Coppa’s pasta. Just saying. We are picky and you can trust us.
We hope everyone stays safe. Happy baking!
— The Upton Team