Fall/Winter 2009 Newsletter

1. Belated Happy Birthday to F1
2. New Sunday Hours
3. Thanksgiving Menu
4. New additions
5. Cookbook update
6. Flour3 update
7. Follow us on Twitter!
8. What Flour means to us
9. Suggestions

1. Belated Happy Birthday to Flour1
For those of you who have been with Flour since the beginning (September 2000) you’ll find it as hard to believe as I do that Flour turned NINE this year. (While Flour might be nine years older, I am most certain that I am not.) It really seems like just the other day that we were nervously opening up our doors for the first time and peeking out from behind the kitchen walls to watch your reaction as you bit into a warm oatmeal scone or a chicken and avocado sandwich. Thanks to each and every one of your for your loyal patronage and perpetual enthusiasm for what we do at Flour. We feel so lucky to be able to make mouth-watering pastries, soups, sandwiches, coffee drinks, dinners and serve them to you with genuine heartfelt hospitality. For many of us within Flour, we consider it a second home, and we are thrilled that many of you feel the same way. And of course a huge thanks to the entire Flour crew! They are simply the best.

2. New Sunday Hours
Now that it’s getting darker sooner, we’ve returned to our normal Sunday hours of 9am-3pm at both locations. Experience at F1 tells us that the South End streets empty out as it gets darker (at least near our block); last year we did notice that at F2 the Children’s Museum stays open late on Sundays throughout the winter and we’ve flirted with the idea of staying open along with it. Email us back and let us know what you think.

3. Thanksgiving Menu
It’s that time! The kitchen is buzzing with bakers prepping pie shells and cooks tasting soups and stuffings, all in anticipation of this year’s Tday Menu. We take care of everything except for the turkey so take a look at the menu and give us a call. We ask that all orders be in by the Friday before Thanksgiving, November 20. We have many old favorites like our pear-cranberry crostata, our apple cider pan gravy, our double-corn cornbread. And we love coming up with new items such as our shaved brussels sprouts with horseradish, currants, and whole-grain mustard; molasses-glazed carrots; apple and pecan stuffing. Feel free to call us or email us with any questions. Please note that we are closed on Thanksgiving day and the day after so that our staff may enjoy their holiday with their families.

4. New Proud Papa!

We have so many new exciting additions to tell you about at Flour! First the warmest of congratulations to Fabian our F1 lead prep cook on the birth of his first baby, Emily. Here’s a picture of proud papa and Emily, dressed as a ladybug for Halloween.

On another personal note congrats are due to Nick Orpik who has been a   supervisor at Flour for the last 3 years and is getting married next week! We welcome his new wife Erin into the Flour family!

Congratulations to Aimee our new manager at Flour2. She comes to us after having managed several framing shops and most recently a fundraising stint on the West Coast at AIDS/LifeCycle. She has impressed us immediately with her dedication to the Flour mission, her professionalism, and her terrific leadership skills. We also have a new assistant manager at Flour1. Whitney has been with us for over a year, gradually working her first to supervisor and now to assistant manager. She cares so much about Flour and it shows in her thoughtful suggestions and commitment to making Flour run as smoothly as possible. With Whitney now working hand-in-hand with our manager Whit we feel more than ever that the service and experience you’ll have at Flour will be top-notch. Our focus is providing our staff with the best management possible so that then they can provide you with the best hospitality possible!

5. Cookbook update
Ah, a newsletter would not be complete without an update on our upcoming cookbook Flour. After many many months of recipe testing and an intense long week of photographs we have finally turned in the completed first draft of the manuscript. There are incredible lead times for designing and stying the book so it actually does not come out until Fall 2010. I blog about both the cookbook and other going-ons at Flour on our cookbook blog in the website, so check it out for updated news. Until then, to whet your appetite, here is a recipe from the book that comes to you just in time for the holiday season. This pudding makes for an incredible simple dessert with whipped cream. I promise once you eat it you won’t be able to stop!

Chocolate pudding
Makes 4 ½ cups, enough for 4-6 people for dessert

1 ½ cups (360 grams) half and half

1 ¾ cups (420 grams) heavy cream

9 ounces (1 ½ cups or 250 grams) bittersweet chocolate, chopped

7 egg yolks (reserve whites for another use)

¾ cup (150 grams) vanilla sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon salt

In a medium saucepan combine half and half and heavy cream and heat until it just comes to a boil. Put chocolate in a microwave proof container and melt in a microwave and scrape into a small bowl. (Or put chocolate in a small bowl and place over a pot of simmering water stirring occasionally until chocolate is melted.) Pour the hot cream over the melted chocolate and whisk until thoroughly combined.

Place egg yolks in medium bowl and slowly whisk in vanilla sugar. Using a small ladle, ladle in a little of the hot cream/chocolate mixture into the egg/sugar mixture and whisk it in; continue adding the hot cream/chocolate to the egg/sugar until it is all combined. (This is called tempering and it allows the egg mixture to slowly be brought up to the same temperature of the cream, rather than shocking it by adding the hot cream all at once.)

Pour mixture back into the saucepan and place on stove over medium-low heat. Cook slowly, stirring the whole time with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula, until the mixture thickens and you can swipe a finger across the back of the spoon and the pudding holds the line. This takes about 5-6 minutes depending upon the heat of the stove. First the mixture will be liquid and loose and then as you continue to stir the bottom of the pan will start to get a little thicker. Be sure to scrape the bottom of the pan with the spoon and stir continuously. The mixture will start to let off a little steam as it gets thicker - as soon as you see wisps of steam coming from the pan you know the pudding is getting close. When the pudding holds a line on the back of a wooden spoon, immediately strain the pudding through a fine strainer into a container. Stir in vanilla and salt. Press a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the pudding to prevent a skin forming on top of the pudding in the fridge and refrigerate until cold, at least 3 hours.

Stir up pudding before serving to smooth it out and spoon into dessert bowls and garnish with unsweetened whipped cream and chocolate shavings.

6. Flour3 update
Yes we are hard at work trying to find a location for a third Flour! We never thought we’d ever have more than one. But 6 years after opening F1 we felt like we had gained enough experience under our belt to tackle a second. With Flour2 we have discovered again the fun of entering into a new neighborhood and introducing a new set of customers to our terrific food and wonderful service. Which now leads us almost 3 years later to thinking of expanding again to a third. The constant refrain has been, “WHERE???” We are looking all over Boston and Cambridge and we will let you know as soon as something is settled. For more detailed thoughts on what goes into our thinking in selecting a third location read our cookbook blog on July 24 in which I outline a few basic requirements for our next location. Cookbook Blog: update on F3 If it hadn’t been for the extremely talented crew of Flour2 we would never have thought ourselves able of opening another location so special thanks to all of the team at F2 especially Sarah and Jeff who have been leading the way since Day One.

7. Follow us!
To keep up to date with what’s going on at Flour follow us on Twitter. Aaron our General Manager is @spleeb and I am @jbchang. www.twitter.com/spleeb and www.twitter.com/jbchang. Both of us post regularly on life at Flour (along with beer updates from Aaron and Myers+Chang/laundry mishap updates from me.)

8. What Flour means to us
Recently I reached out to the staff to ask them what Flour meant to them. I was incredibly touched by so many of the responses. I posted this in a recent blog entry and wanted to share this with you here as well:

“I am no longer surprised to see customers sitting outside waiting for Flour to open in the morning. They are always there. It is obvious that they see Flour as a warm, inviting place where they can get great food and drinks and be welcomed and assisted by friendly staff.”

“What makes Flour so special to me is that I really, truly think that our food is so high quality and delicious (and that is of utmost importance to me, personally) and I’m very proud to be a part of creating some of it.”

“Flour is definitely more than just a job and I know that a lot of people feel the same way. …Flour’s primary mission as going the extra mile to be the best at what we do…. Everyone works really hard and it shows.”

“I don’t think it’s one or few particular flagship products (like the sticky bun) that sets the excellence bar. I strongly believe its a combination of all the little minuscule, detailed things that makes Flour excellent. On top of the pastries, it’s the commitment to a clean dining room, the big front doors, display, music, brewing techniques- just every single little thing we do really well or a little different/more gourmet than the norm.”

“The one thing that we do very well is becoming a part of the community. A big part. … It’s great to have doctors next to policemen/women, next to construction guys, next to artists, lawyers, etc.”

“Flour is a place where you will find an abundance of positivity and respect. Everyone that works at Flour can be confident that they will be treated respectfully, and are expected to treat others the same way. That respect reaches beyond the counter and extends to our customers. We are constantly reminded (in newsletters, board postings..) that our guests are our lifeline and to be grateful for their patronage; we would not be in business without the people that come in everyday.”

“The drive for excellence is what keeps me going day after day. I always think that I can do just a little better than the day before, and I try to. I think that Flours popularity also relies on the interactions of the staff. We all (generally) care about each other and that reflects out to the public. A comfortable atmosphere is what determines success.”

“Flour is quality, exciting, forever changing, creating, learning, managing, challenging, self rewarding.”

“I want people, when they leave flour to have a smile on their face like the smile I have on when I walk in the door to come to work.”

“I see flour as creating a complete experience: living up to and surpassing all of the expectations a customer or employee might have about a small bakery.”

9. Suggestions
We are always looking for ways in which we can improve at Flour. Please don’t hesitate to email us with suggestions, comments, issues, complaints. Someone will get back to you within a few days we promise! Email us here or individually at joanne@flourbakery.com, aaron@flourbakery.com, nicole@flourbakery.com. Thank you again so much for being the best group of customers ever! We are grateful to all of you for your patronage!

Spring 2009 Newsletter

1. Yay for Spring!
2. New Food
3. The Greening of Flour
4. Cookbook Update
5. Events
6. Feedback and suggestions

1. Spring is here!
It’s been a long cold winter.  We’ve weathered through more snow storms that we care to remember.  We’ve seen the economy dip and then try mightily to rise back up; we’ve elected a new President (hip hip hooray!); we’ve all become more attuned to the global world around us.  Here at Flour we view the four walls of Flour as somewhat of a “real-world” sanctuary.  Once you come in, the mouthwatering smells of fresh baked goodies, the sunny smiles of the staff and our customers, the pondering of the scrumptious daily specials…all of these take precedence over whatever might be on your minds and for a while the most important decision you have to make is, “Do I get my favorite chicken sandwich or do I branch out and try the much-touted roast beef?  Do I splurge on a vanilla bean creme brulee?  Do I try the new spicy hot chocolate?  Should I stay and eat here or should I go back out into the real world?”  Our goal is that you leave Flour happier than you were when you came in.  That means everyone: all customers and all our staff!!
Spring allows us to do this more easily with our outdoor seating and extended Sunday Summer hours.  Both locations have a patio for you to hang out in during your breakfast, lunch or break; both Flours are now open until 5pm on Sundays allowing for even more Flour enjoyment.  We look forward to your visit.

2.  New Food
As always the kitchen is a-flurry with new treats and foods to tempt you.
-On the drink side, we offer a Fiery Hot Chocolate that truly lives up to its name!  The warmer weather means the re-introduction of our refreshing Ginger Lemonade.  And the prep staff is building their biceps with all of the squeezing they are doing for our fresh-squeezed OJ - we only do a case a day so it’s first come first served.
-Vegan and non-vegans, get ready for a new favorite sandwich!  Even the meat lovers among us couldn’t stop eating the newest addition to our sandwich menu, a Grilled Organic Tofu Sandwich with Olive Tapenade and Roasted Vegetables.  We expect it to become a Flour favorite very soon.  And take note that we sell our amazing pizza dough by the pound - we have instructions for you if you want to bake some delicious pizza at home.  Ask for it when you are at the register and we’re happy to portion some out for you.
-Spring fruit….mmmmmm…..we are introducing an apricot-granola muffin, a raspberry rhubarb muffin, and a brown-sugar-oatmeal-cherry muffin…betcha can’t eat just one!  (We can’t!)  Keep your eyes open as well for our new brown butter shortbread; a vegan vanilla-mixed berry muffin; a gluten-free almond-chocolate chip cookie.  These are all new treats that are in the works ready to debut over the next few weeks.

3. The Greening of Flour
Flour is a certified Green restaurant!  We recycle plastic, glass, metal, and cardboard.  We reuse all of our plastic containers and we sift through the dishbin to pull out all of the glass and plastic bottles that are thrown away.  We use as many biodegradable and green products as we can get our hands on.  And now we are composting at Flour on Washington Street. Once we’ve worked out the kinks we will introduce composting to Flour on Farnsworth.  We aim to minimize our carbon footprint as responsibly and efficiently as we can.  Join us in our efforts!  Say no to the extra plastic or paper bag if you can or bring in your own bag and we’d love to pack up your items in your own green bag.  Every step counts.

4. Cookbook update
Writing a cookbook is a much more involved and intricate process than you would imagine - keep up to date with our progress by clicking onto our “cookbook” tab on the website where I post entries 2-3 times a week. And definitely send in questions and queries - it’s great fun to answer questions about the book and all things Flour from our cookbook blog. The manuscript is due in about one month so we’re busy busy busy!

5.  Events
We’ve been busy taking part in host of amazing charity events and fundraisers.  Thanks to all of those who came and supported AIDS research at the Annual Taste of South End; diabetes research at the Taste of Ginger; arts and performances by the Friends of Fort Point at the Taste of Fort Point.  Upcoming we are participating in the Friends of Boston Homeless event (April 16 at the State Room) and the GLSED Jazz and Chocolate Festival (May 17th at 28 Degrees) and the Goodwill Good Party (June 11).  Please come show your support…and try our tasty treats!

6. Feedback and suggestions
We really want to hear from you, our amazing customers - the good, the bad, the ugly. Every email you send in is read carefully and every suggestion is taken very seriously. We do our absolute best to address issues brought to our attention. Our goal every day is to offer the best service and the most delicious food we can, all while running a responsible business and giving back to our community, and to enjoy every minute of it. We couldn’t do it without our fantastic loyal customers and we definitely couldn’t do it without our incredibly caring, devoted, and hard-working staff. Please email us at info@flourbakery.com and Aaron, Nicole, and I promise to get back to you within several days.

January 2009 Newsletter

1. Happy Birthday Flour2!
2. Staff changes at Flour
3. New Treats
4. Valentines Day
5. Special Items
6. Cookbook
7. Feedback and suggestions

1. Happy Birthday Flour2!

It’s hard for us to believe but our baby sibling Flour2 is TWO. We are happier than ever to be in the Fort Point Channel neighborhood. We love the vibrant artist community that supports us daily, we’re thrilled to be so close to the Children’s Museum which has helped introduce us to a new suburban customer base, and we warmly welcome our new neighbors Drink and Sportello, Barbara Lynch’s new bar and Italian eatery respectively. It’s truly a fantastic neighborhood with the most welcoming and friendly customers. We thank all of you who come to F2 for your loyal patronage and for a fabulous first two years.

2. Staff changes at Flour

We’ve got a slew of new faces at both Flours and we would love to introduce everyone to you:
Flour on Washington Street: A warm welcome to Kristen Lawson who will be the new Pastry Chef for this location. Kristen comes to us from Petit Robert where she was the pastry chef for several years. Nicole and I met her while working with her on a James Beard Mother’s Day Brunch that we were both invited to participate in. When she emailed us saying she would be looking for full-time employment after a brief traveling excursion, we snapped her up. She will be working with Nicole and Julius to continue to make the pastries at Flour the best they can be. She replaces Karoline who has been our Pastry Chef for the last year and a half. Karoline is leaving for South America to finish up her graduate degree, and we are really excited for her in her upcoming adventure. We thank Karoline for her incredible dedication and hard work and wish her much luck in her travels and future.
Flour on Farnsworth Street: Congratulations to Jon Demiglio for his recent promotion to Manager for F2. Jon worked for a year at Washington Street as a supervisor, left for a brief hiatus, and rejoined our team on Farnsworth Street this past summer. He’s now in charge of making sure our front staff offers the friendliest and warmest service we can. And he’s doing a fantastic job!
Congratulations as well to Cristina Valente who has been promoted to Head Baker at this location. She has been with us since we’ve opened and is now working together with our Pastry Chef Sarah to train new staff, maintain product quality, and run the kitchen on Sarah’s days off. She takes the place of Shira who is moving on in the pastry world, who we are really sorry to lose, and who we hope to bring back to Flour one way or another in the future. Thank you Shira for a terrific and wonderful 3+ years with us.

3. New treats

We just can’t stay still in the kitchen. The bakers and chefs are hard at work all the time to come up with new ways to tempt you! In the pastry kitchen we are excited to offer Brioche Pizzas - these are a great savory option for breakfast and we will feature a special flavor of the day. These are brioche buns filled with cheese and veggies and sometimes bacon or ham and topped with an egg. The whole thing goes into the oven and bakes until the egg is just set. Mmmmmm….. We also have new muffin flavors - Best Bran with Golden Raisin and Sour Cherries, Ginger Pear, and Lemon Poppy. Come check them out! On the savory end, on Farnsworth Street besides our dinner specials, Chef Jeff is offering crudite snacks with hummus and snack-sized containers of tabouli/pasta/potato/other salad of the day. These are great snacking options/light lunches for those of you trying to stick to New Year’s resolutions. On Washington Street Chef Corey has been experimenting with hot lunch specials to great success, and as always his offering of 4 different take-out dinner specials each week are a huge hit. Sign up on our website to join our mailing list if you’d like to receive the menu for the week every Monday.

4. Valentine’s Day

If ever a day was created for Flour it is Valentine’s Day! We will be offering a Valentine’s Day menu this year with all sorts of amazing new items. We will have homemade marshmallows in various flavors like rosewater-lavender and orange blossom-vanilla; hand dipped chocolates in flavors such as honey tangerine; French-style macarons in passion fruit, chocolate and other scrumptious flavors; sourdough chocolate cherry bread; and as always our Valentine’s Day Sweetheart Cookies with both sweet sayings (”Kiss Me”) and naughty sayings (use your imagination…our bakers sure do!!). The menu will come out on February 1 and we will start selling Vday items the first week of February. Show your loved ones how much they are loved by bringing them treats from Flour!

5. Special Items

Now we do happen to think that all of the items we make at Flour are special! We have a team of pastry cooks and savory cooks who work super hard every day to make sure that everything we offer is delicious, fresh, perfectly cooked, and mouthwatering. No, these new special items are actually created for those of you who have dietary restrictions and we’re trying to accommodate as many of you as we can. Going forward, thanks to the suggestion of a favorite customer (Thanks Bonnie!), we will label our savory items with “vegetarian” and/or “vegan” so that those of you who are either know what you can enjoy from Flour. We are also experimenting daily with gluten-free treats for those of you with celiac. It’s not lost on us the irony of a bakery named Flour trying to make pastries without flour. But we know that many of you have a wheat intolerance and we don’t want Flour’s treats to be off limits to you! So stay tuned as we taste our way through gluten free offerings and find a few that we hope will knock your socks off.

6. Cookbook

Just an update for those of you who are eagerly awaiting the Flour cookbook. We’re on track and the Introduction and preliminary Table of Contents and Sample Chapter have all been approved, heartily! Writing a cookbook is a much more involved and intricate process than you would imagine - keep up to date with our progress by clicking onto our “cookbook” tab on the website where I post entries 2-3 times a week. And definitely send in questions and queries - it’s great fun to answer questions about the book and all things Flour from our cookbook blog.

7. Feedback and suggestions

We always love to hear from you, our amazing customers - the good, the bad, the ugly. Every email you send in is read carefully and every suggestion is taken very seriously. We do our absolute best to address issues brought to our attention. Our goal every day is to offer the best service and the most delicious food we can, all while running a responsible business and giving back to our community, and to enjoy every minute of it. We couldn’t do it without our fantastic loyal customers and we definitely couldn’t do it without our incredibly caring, devoted, and hard-working staff. Please email us at info@flourbakery.com and Aaron, Nicole, and I promise to get back to you within several days. Happy new year!

Flour Bakery + Cafe Fall 2008 Newsletter

1.  Welcome Avery!

2.  Happy birthday Flour1!

3.  Greening of Flour - recycle containers, don’t take a bag,

4.  Line management

5.  Roasted tomatoes

6.  Myers+Chang desserts

7.  Cookbook update

8.  Upcoming holiday season

9.  Robert Steinberg tribute

1.  Welcome Avery!

It hasn’t happened as of the distribution of this newsletter, but we are all eagerly awaiting the imminent arrival of Avery Grace Constable, our general manager Aaron’s new baby girl!  Any day now she’ll make her appearance and we send Aaron off on his paternity leave with the heartiest and warmest of congratulations.  We couldn’t be happier for him and his wife Melissa.  And we can’t wait to meet the newest Constable!  (And Flour addict…Melissa apparently had quite a sweet tooth during her pregnancy and she acquainted herself with many Flour pastries that she hadn’t had before.  So Avery will have a little Flour inside of her from the very start!)

2.  Happy Birthday Flour!

It’s really hard for us to believe but Flour on Washington Street celebrates our EIGHTH anniversary on Friday September 26.  As is tradition we will be giving out birthday cupcakes to all customers that day.  We are so grateful to all of you who have supported us over the years, allowing us to continue to do what we love to do: make the best pastries and food we can and offer it with the friendliest service possible to make your day and your life sweeter!  Thank you all so much.  Flour1 will close early on Columbus Day Monday at 6pm so that the staff can all go out and celebrate in style!  So please note that our hours of operation for Flour1 on Monday October 13 will be 7am-6pm.  Flour2 on Farnsworth Street will be open regular business hours from 7am-7pm.

3.  Greening of Flour

As we reported last time, we’re anxious to get on the green bandwagon and do our part in being environmentally conscious.  We’ve switched to plasticware made out of recycled materials and we have also joined the Green Restaurant Association (www.dinegreen.com) whose mission is “to create an ecologically sustainable restaurant industry.”  Amen to that!  We are following their suggestions and hope to receive our official certification very soon.  You can help us in our quest!  We have a sticker on our granola containers that if you return the container to us, we give you $.25 off of your next granola purchase.  This applies to cookie dough as well.  We reuse these containers over and over so please don’t throw them away - bring them back and save a container and you’ll save a quarter.  Also when getting your breakfast pastry or sandwich, if you don’t care for or need a bag, let us know!  We’re happy to hand you your item directly and save us and the earth from one more bag.  Please let us know if you have other ideas to help us in our goal.

4.  Line Management

One of the most common complaints we get at Flour is that the line is too long.  Customers wonder why they must wait for us to take their order and then wait again for the order to be rung up and then wait once more for the sandwich maker to make their lunch.  Some have suggested that we give the order directly to the sandwich maker to speed up the process.  Unfortunately this does not work to make your wait time shorter!  Let me explain why:  there is only one line of tickets that goes to the sandwich people, which means that even if we were to bypass the register and bring your order directly to the sandwich maker, all of the orders in front of you would still be in front of yours.  The sandwich makers are making the sandwiches as fast as they can in the order that they come in.  So while it might seem that your order is being held up while you’re waiting to be rung up at the register, in actuality your order would still have to wait for the sandwich makers to finish the orders before it even if they received your order right away.  Believe me we’ve tried to think of every way possible to make your wait time shorter and we hope you’ve found that once you’re in line it actually does move fairly quickly.  We are so appreciative of your patience as we try every day to give great service that also is as efficient as possible to all of our customers.  We welcome suggestions from all of you as to how we can be even more efficient. However we do ask that you understand that we are committed to giving you the best and friendliest service we can which doesn’t always translate to the absolute fastest service.  Thanks!

5.  Roasted Tomatoes

Every year around this time of year the vine ripe tomatoes start to get mealy and our chefs are faced with the conundrum of how to serve tomatoes in our sandwiches when it’s not tomato season.  We switch to roasted plum tomatoes which we’ve found are the next best alternative to fresh vine-ripes. (Some of you are so enamored with the roasted plums that you ask for them even in the height of tomato season!)  So don’t be surprised when you see that the tomatoes you’re used to seeing in your sandwiches are soon roasted plums.  We hope you enjoy them just as much…if not more!

6.  Myers+Chang Desserts

Myers+Chang is the Asian restaurant that I own with my husband Christopher Myers - we are down the street from Flour on Washington Street and we just celebrated our 1-year anniversary. My M+C birthday present to myself was to finally introduce a dessert menu to our offerings.  We debuted the new dessert menu last week and hope you’ll come check them out soon!  Flour2 is making them out of our kitchen on Farnsworth Street and the pastry cooks are doing a terrific job.  We have a coconut cream pie with lime whipped cream, a homemade almond milk custard, a vanilla parfait with a fresh orange granita, our famous lemon-ginger mousse with a homemade fortune cookie and a bittersweet chocolate cake with a vietnamese coffee sauce.  YUUUUMMMMMMM….

7.  Cookbook Update

The Flour cookbook is well underway and you can check for updates on the “cookbook” link on our website where I post about its progress.  While it’s not going to be available until 2010 (!!!!!) it’s been a great event for us at Flour because we are re-testing all of the recipes and continuing on our never ending journey to make the best pastries we can every day.  Already we’ve improved our oreo, cupcake, and cornmeal lime cookie based on recipe testing for the cookbook.  So while you may not be able to get your hands on a book for a while, you can certainly enjoy the fruits of our labors at Flour every day.

8.  Upcoming Holiday Season

Flour is like CVS and the grocery store - we’re thinking about the holidays while you’re still in summer shorts and we’re already stocking our shelves with holiday products.  We’ve been buying aluminum pie pan tins, portable coffee cake pans, cellophane and raffia, food coloring for holiday cookies.  But it’s hardly even October, you say?  To us that means it’s time to think about pies, roasts, yule logs, and all things festive.  Our Thanksgiving Menu which includes all things you need for a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner except the actual turkey is available on November 1 and our Christmas menu is available the Monday following Thanksgiving.  Please note that their are order deadlines for both holidays.

9.  Robert Steinberg Tribute

Finally, many of you rave about our Scharffen Berger chocolate cookies, but not all of you know the story behind the man who created Scharffen Berger Chocolates, Robert Steinberg. Robert was a dear friend who battled lymphoma for almost 2 decades and he passed away Wednesday September 19. David Lebovitz, pastry chef extraordinaire, wrote a moving tribute to him on his blog, www.davidlebowitz.com.  My tribute, posted on our cookbook blog, follows.  He is sorely missed and he made my life much sweeter.

“Robert Steinberg introduced himself to me over a decade ago when I was pastry chef at Rialto restaurant in Cambridge.  He’d just started up a chocolate company in San Francisco called ScharffenBerger Chocolates and was eager for me to try his stuff.  I met him in a tiny kitchen of a local bakery that was near Rialto and within minutes we were sharing chocolate experiences, laughing about mutual friends, interrupting each other with stories about various restaurants or to exclaim about a certain chocolate, and all the while he was plying me with his amazing wares.  I left after an hour with a bagful of different chocolates to test - I admit that most of it went directly into my mouth and hardly any of it made its way back to the restaurant for baking.

After that our friendship was set.  We met every time he came back to Boston and while we always started talking about chocolate we soon veered into long passionate discussions about our work, our travels, our lives.  Robert was nothing if not passionate and I’ll always remember how full of life and more importantly, love of live, he was.  We wrote to each other (I have such fascinating letters from him - snail mail!- describing chocolate trips and pastry sojourns), I taught him how to text (although he hated texting), we tried to keep in touch via email, but person-to-person visits were how our friendship flourished.  I visited him in San Francisco a few times; his mom lives in Marblehead, MA, so his visits here were much more frequent.

He passed away a few days ago.  He had lymphoma (diagnosed several years before I met him) but had so successfully battled it thus far that I never thought it would really win.  I had heard he was in the hospital and called his cell, only to be told by a friend that he’d passed a few minutes before.

He was one of the most direct, unassuming, generous, down-to-earth, and simply interesting people I’ve ever met.  He was a dear dear friend and I’ll miss him tremendously.  Chocolate lovers everywhere owe him a huge debt of gratitude for how much he single handedly improved the chocolate landscape in the US; I owe him for always sharing with me his delightful friendship and caring and love.”

Flour Bakery + Cafe Summer 2008 Newsletter

1. Fourth of July schedule

2. Flour is going green

3. Cookbook update

4. New managers

5. New food

6. Sticky bun madness

7. Myers+Chang

8. TBC

1. Fourth of July schedule

Fireworks, barbeque, sun and beach…every year we close the bakery for July 4 to allow our staff to enjoy the holiday. We wish everyone a wonderful holiday!

-Washington Street will be closed from July 4-July 10 - we are planning some minor renovations and major cleaning, and we reopen on Friday July 11 normal business hours.

-Farnsworth Street will be closed on July 4 only, reopening Saturday July 5 regular business hours, 8am-6pm.

2. Flour is going green

It’s an issue we all care deeply about and are committed to getting better at! We are switching out our plasticware to eco-friendly plastic cups that are made with corn byproducts and are biodegradeable. We are looking at other ways we can be green such as recycling our glassware and plasticware. We do recycle our biggest waste output - cardboard and paper - every week, and we encourage you to email us with ideas on other ways we can be green. Can I borrow from Obama?? Together we can!

3. Cookbook update

A Flour baking book is in the works! Check out the progress by clicking the “cookbook” tab on our website. Read regular postings about the process of planning, selling, writing, and marketing our cookbook. Here is a sample of a recipe that was included in the cookbook proposal:

Flour’s Famous Banana Bread

Makes one 9-inch loaf

I vividly remember grocery shopping with my mom and toting home large bags of overripe bananas when we found them on special for 10 cents a pound. Most of the time they were brown and spotty, but they were still pretty good for snacking. The problem was that they only stayed good for a few days before they really became too ripe to eat. Knowing this, my mom would encourage my brother, my dad, and me to “have a banana!” every time we were near the kitchen. It got to the point where my brother and I would avoid the kitchen for fear of being accosted by Mom and her banana entreaties. So I developed this banana bread as a protection device for us. And we loved it so much we sometimes found ourselves buying more bananas just to make it. I’ve continued to tweak it and refine it since then, and today it is one of the hottest sellers at Flour. It’s filled with lots of bananas and crème fraiche, and we bake it at a low temperature so it stays super-moist. We can hardly make it fast enough to keep up with demand. (And I’m sure our customers appreciate that we never try to get them to eat our extra mushy bananas.)

1½ cups (190 grams) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup + 2 tablespoons (230 grams) sugar

2 eggs

½ cup vegetable oil

3 ½ very ripe medium bananas (about 340 grams or 1 1/3 cups mashed)

2 tablespoons crème fraiche or sour cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¾ cup (70 grams) walnuts, toasted and chopped

-Heat the oven to 325 degrees.

-Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Set aside.

-In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whip attachment, beat the sugar and eggs on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. (Or whip by hand with an electric hand mixer until light and fluffy, about 8 minutes.)

-With the mixer on low speed, slowly drizzle in the oil. Be sure NOT to pour the oil in all at once; add it slowly so that it has time to incorporate into the eggs and doesn’t deflate the air you’ve just beaten into the batter.

-Add the mashed bananas, crème fraiche, and vanilla and mix on low speed until just combined. Fold in the dry ingredients and nuts by hand until thoroughly combined, so there are no more flour streaks in the batter

-Pour the batter into a buttered 9×5-inch loaf pan and bake for 60 to 75 minutes, until the top of the banana bread is golden brown and springs back when you poke it in the middle. If your finger sinks when you poke it, it needs to bake a little longer. Let cool for at least 30 minutes and then pop out of the pan and serve. Keeps for 2 to 3 days at room temperature, tightly wrapped. Or store in the freezer, tightly wrapped in plastic, for up to 2 weeks and defrost overnight at room temperature.

4. New managers

You may have noticed a new face or two or three at either bakery. The summer is upon us and we have our new summer crew in place - we welcome all the students who pass through here during the season for their summer job and hope they have a blast working at the grooviest bakery around!

-Leading the charge at Farnsworth Street is Shreyas, newly promoted to Manager, who comes to us with ample experience in the food business and has been with us at Flour already for almost a year. She has the same commitment as all of the other Flour managers and staff do - to give our customers the best experience possible through warm friendly hospitable service and mouth-watering delicious food. Welcome Shreyas!

-On Washington Street we have been grooming our very own Whit who comes to us with lots of cooking and kitchen experience and has his eyes on opening a place of his own in the future. He will be taking the helm at Washington Street in the very near future, guiding the staff towards being the best possible representatives of Flour and pushing us all to be better at all we do.

-Both of these managers will be taking over their respective bakeries as we all prepare for the imminent arrival of the soon-to-arrive very newest member of the Flour family - Aaron Constable’s baby. Aaron our General Manager will be taking time off in the fall to spend time with his wife Melissa and new baby and we are all abuzz with excitement and glee for the new changes within Flour and with Aaron and Melissa. We’ll miss Aaron’s indomitable spirit but we’ve got some pretty awesome replacements in his temporary absence.

5. New food

We have finally - to the great delight of many of our customers - introduced whole wheat focaccia to our bread offering for our sandwiches. We’ve tinkered and tinkered until we are quite blue in the face and finally we have a bread recipe we are thrilled with. Simply request wheat foccacia the next time you’re in and we’re happy to make your favorite sandwich on our new bread. (Unfortunately the grilled roast chicken and the grilled portobello melt are both pre-made and cannot be ordered on wheat bread.)

Egg sandwiches, a daily offering at Farnsworth Street and a Sunday-only offering at Washington Street, are now available EVERY DAY at Washington Street. That’s right - you may now get our famous Egg Sandwich with tomato, country ham or applewood smoked bacon, mesclun greens, special dijionnaise on a homemade roll every single day at both locations. What a way to start out your day!

We introduce white tea to our menu! Several customers have requested this item (see, we do read all of your suggestions!) and we found fragrant delicious white tea called White Peony that we are now offering. White tea is uncured and unfermented tea leaves, it is mild and refreshing, and it has more anti-oxidants than green or black tea. Plus it’s really yummy - try it!

A special summer drink on Washington Street for the summer - Ginger Lemonade - refreshing as can be. And we offer rotating fruity spritzer specials on Farnsworth Street. We love the summer and all the excuses it gives us to play around with fizzy summery concoctions.

6. Sticky bun madness

If you’ve been on the North Pole for the last year the you may not be aware of the sticky bun craze that has taken Flour Bakery by storm. We were challenged to a Throwdown by Bobby Flay last year on the Food Network and each time the episode airs we morph into a sticky bun factory. Not a very efficient one at that however. We are so in love with all of our other pastries that we refuse to stop making our cookies and cakes and tarts and breads and scones and muffins and and and…you get the picture.

What this means is that while we are doing everything we can to make as many sticky buns as we can every single day, we are not always going to have enough to satisfy every single last customer. So we HIGHLY RECOMMEND that if you have your heart set on having a sticky bun at Flour that you call ahead and reserve one! (Or two or thirty…as some people do.) We’ve gone from making 12-15 a day to 12-15 an hour and that is still sometimes not enough. Sticky buns are great because of all of the care and love and patience that go into making and shaping and baking each one, so please be understanding if we don’t have them at Flour all of the time. We only want them to go out if they are fabulous.

If you are from out of town and are dying to try them, we do ship them on a limited basis. Please note however that we only ship them overnight which is pretty darn expensive. We wish there were an easier way but you really can’t enjoy them if they are more than a day old - they they are just not a Flour sticky bun, but rather a Flour doorstop. Click on the “shipping sticky buns” tab in the catering menu for more information on our website, www.flourbakery.com

7. Myers+Chang

So many of our Flour regulars have made it down the street to Myers+Chang, our sister restaurant and we want to thank you all for the wonderful support. Myers+Chang is a fun and funky Asian eatery open lunch and dinner every day. We’ve got an incredible menu of homestyle Taiwanese cooking, Thai and Malaysian dishes, basically anything that tastes amazing from Asia…such as red curry halibut with baby bok choy and crispy shallots, thai ginger chicken salad, Mama Chang’s pork and chive potsticker dumplings, black pepper pork stirfry with ginger, scallions, and asparagus, nasi goreng - an indonesian fried rice with shrimp, pork and a farm egg. Check out the menu at www.myersandchang.com and come visit us at 1145 Washington Street in the South End anytime.

8. TBC

Still here? Wow! TBC is short for The Best Customers…and that is what we have at Flour. We are incredibly grateful to each of you every day for allowing to do what we love most - make the best pastries and food we possibly can and serve it all with a smile and with a greeting that makes your day brighter. We know that the economy is rough (we’re all feeling it) and we are appreciative of everyone who comes to visit us every day, whether for a quick cup of coffee, a regular lunch, or a special occasion cake. Thank you all for your patronage and for your compliments and suggestions. Keep them coming! We’d love to hear from all of you. HAPPY SUMMER!!

Spring 2008 Newsletter

Springtime is always a very exciting time for us here at Flour…outdoor seating, new summer hours, and all of the amazing new produce that we get to play around with. Here are recent highlights from our world:

1. New people

Our general manager Aaron has a bun in the oven! Well technically it’s his wife Melissa and we couldn’t be more delighted. Many of you know Aaron and know what an incredible force of nature he is for all of us at Flour - the love and hospitality and friendliness he brings to work every single day are unstoppable. We can’t wait to meet the newest Constable. So if you notice Aaron’s temporary absence around September, you’ll all know why….

Flour on Washington Street welcomes a new Chef! Only once before have we introduced a new chef - and that was over 4 1/2 half years ago when Aniceto Sousa joined our kitchen from Radius and brought our food to a whole new level. Aniceto has decided to re-enter the fine dining arena and is going to go back to restaurant work; we will miss him dearly and thank him for many years of incredible food. We are extremely excited to introduce to you our new Chef Corey Johnson. Corey has spent several years at Fore Street in Portland, Maine, as well as with Aramark in Boston. Check out his profile on our website, www.flourbakery.com, and come try his food!

2. New business

As mentioned above, we welcome back our outdoor seating…at both locations. Please come join us for a cappucino and pastry or a homemade raspberry seltzer and slice of quiche al fresco. At Farnsworth Street the patio is brand new, and it’s beautifully designed with a frosted glass ceiling and a bright shiny Flour sign to lead the way in. The patios offer a great way to relax and enjoy our food and the neighborhood.Also starting May 11 we re-introduce our Sunday Summer hours at both locations. This means we will now be open from 9-5 pm. Hope to see you then!

3. New items

On Washington Street, we have decided to follow Farnsworth Street’s lead and offer Egg Sandwiches every day. These are our famous egg sandwiches made with either ham or bacon, tomato, cheddar cheese, greens and special sauce all on a homemade roll. They have quite a following, and we are really happy to be able to offer them now every day at both locations.WWF is at Flour! No this is not the World Wresting Federation but rather Whole Wheat Foccacia. After many many years of our customers begging us to offer a wheat bread alternative to our homemade white foccacia for our sandwiches, we’ve developed a recipe that we’re crazy about and can’t wait for all of you to try it. Simply ask for it when you order your sandwich. Unfortunately our grilled sandwiches are prepared in advance so we can’t offer these on our wheat focaccia.

Green coffee is at Flour - bring your own mug into Flour and you’ll get coffee for $1. Bring your own travel mug or other cup to Flour and we’ll fill it up with iced coffee or tea for the small iced drink price. We’re taking small steps to make it a greener world, and we’re starting to ask if you want a bag with your purchase. Each bag and cup counts!

Chef Jeff on Farnsworth Street is introducing Dinner Specials to F2. Come by and check them out…he’s offered one or two per week so far and will continue to increase his menu as he gets into the swing of things. We’ve offered a vegetarian lasagna, a roasted salmon and rice dinner, chicken caesar salad….yum. These are take-out dinners for you to heat up and enjoy at home. We want to fill you upwith Flour food morning, noon, and night!4. New neighbors

Finally welcome to a few new businesses around Flour on Washington Street: Aroa Chocolates is located a few doors down on Washington Street and is owned and operated by Alex Luna, a great friend of Flour and wonderful pastry chef. A little further away is ChocoLee, another new chocolate shop owned by Lee Napoli a highly regarded pastry chef, dear friend and amazing chocolatier. Her shop is on West Newton Street. And we hear that Stella’s new take-out shop will be opening soon as well. We are excited to have so many new places open up around us and welcome the growth of our thriving business environment on Washington Street. (And in a few months at Farnsworth Street we hope to have more news about the new food establishments that will be opening up near us by our friend Barbara Lynch. Stay tuned.)Heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you for being the best customers we could ever hope for. Every day we get to make delicious pastries, fabulous food, and make your day start or end with a smile with our hospitality. YOU are what make Flour Bakery + Café the wonderful place it is. Any and all suggestions and comments are welcome - please email us at joanne@flourbakery.com, aaron@flourbakery.com, and nicole@flourbakery.com. We look forward to seeing you and hearing from you. Happy Spring!

Early Spring 2008 Newsletter

Okay so it’s not really spring, in fact it’s not even sort of close to spring, but every now and then the sunshine peeks out and gives us hope that winter will not last forever.  Inside the bakery it’s toasty and warm, and this is where we like to be!  Here’s some notes and thoughts about the latest goings-on at Flour.  We hope to hear back from you with your suggestions and comments and feedback!  (BTW, some of you on this email list are from out of town and are receiving our weekly updates with our dinner specials at Washington Street - if you’d like to be removed from this list and simply receive the occasional newsletters we send out, please let us know and we’ll be sure to stop sending you the weekly specials!)

1.  Happy Birthday Flour2!

2.  Superbowl and Valentine’s Day treats

3.  New items

4.  Promotions within Flour

5.  Upcoming events

6.  Shipping sticky buns

7.  Congratulations Pie Bakery!

8.  Recipe Share

1. Happy Birthday Flour2!

It’s really hard for us to believe that Flour on Farnsworth passed its one year mark a few weeks ago on January 19!  As is Flour tradition, we passed out free mini cupcakes to all of our customers at F2 that day and we all wished each other a happy birthday.  We have loved being in a new neighborhood and are so grateful for the support and loyal patronage of the Fort Point Channel crowd.  Special thanks to the incredible staff that has been with us since day one - that would be Jeff, Sarah, Sarah aka Ruby, Cristina, Shira aka honeydew, Matt, Hosmin, Rita, Aristeu, Orlando, Johnny aka Primo, Nicole, and Aaron aka dawg.  We couldn’t have done it without them!  And we continue to build on our strong team that we hope will be around to help us celebrate our second anniversary.

2.  Superbowl and Valentine’s Day treats

Nicole our head pastry chef goes a little nuts around the holidays and Superbowl Sunday and Valentine’s Day are no exception.  We’ve already been selling football-shaped sugar cookies decorated with our favorite players’ names, and for Valentine’s Day you’ll see the annual appearance of our sweetheart cookies.  These are heart-shaped cookies frosted with sweet sayings such as “be mine” and “kiss me”…and we also offer our naughty cookies with sayings that I can’t repeat here!  Over the years these X-rated cookies have been selling more than the sweet ones almost two-to-one.  Who would have thought that we have such a racy clientele!  We start selling these on February 9th.  In addition to these cookies Nicole will be selling a limited number of boxes of hand-made, hand-dipped chocolates that she makes each year just for V-Day.  These go quickly so if you are interested please do call and place an order.  Plus we will have pink peppermint oreos, chocolate cherry bread, pink cupcakes and a plethora of fruit tarts and little chocolate cakes for you to order for your sweetie.

3.  New items

We’ve been hearing many requests for vegan items and the bakers have their testing hats on in full force.  We’ve recently introduced the caramelized apple and raisin vegan muffin (which is delicious in its own right) as well as the Flour Power bar which has rice cereal, nuts, brown rice flour, dried fruits and seeds.  Yum!  Rice crispy treats are a trip down memory lane and now that we’ve introduced them to our roster, we can hardly keep up with demand - it seems that you all love them as much as we do.  And keep your eyes out for a new sour cherry pastry that we will be starting soon, inspired by an incredible sour cherry tart we picked up recently at Canto 6, our friends Alex and Evangeline’s amazing bakery in Jamaica Plain.  Holla!

4.  Promotions within Flour

Most of you know Nicole and Aaron from one bakery or the other…and in the past few months you’ve probably seen more of them at both.  Nicole Rhode, who has been with Flour almost since the very beginning, was recently promoted to Head Pastry Chef for Flour, overseeing pastry quality and production at both bakeries.  Aaron Constable, who has been at Flour for over 6 years, has been promoted to General Manager, overseeing service and overall operations at both.  Both Nicole and Aaron have played such a huge part in the growth and continued success of Flour and giving them more room to spread their talented wings seemed a natural step.  We are incredibly lucky to have them both, and I can’t thank them enough for all they do for Flour!  Taking Nicole’s place at Flour1 heading up production of the baking kitchen is Karoline Boehm-Goodnick, who was a part-time baker for us for a while before taking the plunge and becoming full-time baker and pastry chef at Washington Street.  Congratulations all!

5.  Upcoming events

a.  Nicole and Sarah (pastry chef at Flour2) are participating in a Girl Scout Cookie Bake-off Contest on February 5 at the Hotel Commonwealth with their caramel chocolate bread pudding using Samoas cookies.  The contest benefits the Girl Scouts and helps sponsor scholarships.  Good luck!

b.  On April 1 come join us at the annual Joslin Diabetes Center Taste of Ginger event!  We will be there in full force offering a healthy and delicious pastry offering.

c.  Nicole and I (Joanne) are attending the James Beard House along with a number of Boston pastry chefs on May 11 to cook a Mother’s Day Brunch at the Beard House.  It’s truly an honor to be invited and we are pleased as punch to be a part of this fun event.

6.  Shipping sticky buns

Some of you may have seen us on Throwdown with Bobby Flay where we were paid a surprise visit from Chef Flay in a sticky bun challenge.  I’m proud to say our sticky buns won and many of you have asked if they can be shipped.  We started shipping due to high demand and if you’d like to place an order please email us at catering@flourbakery.com.  A few caveats to be aware of:  we will only ship overnight (as the buns are really not edible after 2 days or so) but unfortunately overnight shipping is really costly - it can range anywhere from $45-60 per shipment;  we ask for a minimum order of 6 buns; and we ship on Mondays for Tuesday arrivals.  Thank you for understanding these constraints and if you’ve ordered them from us already, let us know what you think!

7.  Congrats to Pie Bakery!

Our friend and fellow baker Paige Retus who baked with us for a short while has opened up her bakery Pie Bakery in Newton Center and it’s absolutely dreamy.  We’ve been several times already in the month that it’s been open and each time we have more and more compliments to shower on Paige.  Check them out for some great pies!

8.  Recipe share

We love sharing our recipes so that you can create some Flour treats and deliciousness at home!  Here is a recipe for an old favorite, our lemon bars, which we no longer carry at the bakery but make for a wonderful afternoon treat.

LEMON BARS        

An old favorite of the bakery’s, these bars are sweet, tart, buttery, and light.  Cut them into smaller squares for a afternoon tea.

Rick’s Shortbread

½ pound unsalted butter

4 tablespoons (1.75 ounces) sugar

2 tablespoons (.5 ounces) confectioner’s sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg yolk

1 cup (4.5 ounces) all purpose flour

1 cup (4.5 ounces) cake flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt.

1 recipe lemon curd (see below)

• Using a kitchen aid mixer and paddle attachment or mixing by hand with a wooden spoon, cream together butter and sugars on medium speed until mixture is light and fluffy, about 5 minutes.
• Beat in vanilla extract and egg yolk until thoroughly combined.  Scrape bowl down with a spatula to make sure that all of the yolk is mixed in with the butter/sugar mixture.
• Sift together flours, baking powder and salt.
• Using the mixer or a wooden spoon, slowly blend the flour into the butter/sugar mix on low speed.  Mix until the flour is totally blended in and the dough is homogenous.  Make sure to scrape bowl down with a spatula again during the mixing to combine the flour in thoroughly.
• Scrape dough out of bowl and onto a sheet of plastic wrap.  Wrap dough entirely with plastic and press down to form a flat disk about ½ inch thick.  Place in refrigerator for about 15 minutes, until the dough has firmed up but is still pliable.
• In the meantime make the lemon curd (recipe below).
• When the dough has firmed up enough to become manageable, take it out of the plastic wrap and roll it in between two large sheets of parchment paper into a 9×11 inch rectangle.  It will be about ¼ inch thick. 
• Keeping the dough on the parchment, transfer the dough and parchment into a 9×11 inch metal or glass baking pan that has sides at least 2 inches high.  Press the dough to fit the bottom of the pan and allow the parchment to come up the sides of the pan.  Don’t worry if the dough is not perfectly smooth – it needs to be about the same thickness throughout the bottom but it does not have to be smooth. 
• Bake in a 350 degree still oven for about 20 minutes, until the shortbread is light brown, the same color as maple wood.
• Remove from oven and pour lemon curd filling on top of shortbread.  Smooth the filling evenly over the shortbread with a spatula.
• Bake again in a 350 degree oven for another 15-20 mintues, until the curd has set and jiggles like firm jello.
• Remove and let cool to room temperature.
• Refrigerate for at least 4 hours until the curd has set.
• Gently tug the parchment on all sides and when the bars are loosened from the pan, slide them out onto a cutting board.
• Trim the sides of the lemon bars and cut the bars into 9 pieces.

Lemon Curd

2 cups + 2 tablespoons (17.75 ounces) lemon juice

¼ pound unsalted butter

¼ cup (2 ounces) heavy cream

2 cups (14 ounces) sugar

8 eggs

4 egg yolks

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

• In a medium saucepan, heat together lemon juice, butter, and cream until just under a boil.
• Whisk together sugar, eggs and egg yolks in a medium bowl until combined.
• Remove liquid from the heat and gradually whisk in a little bit of the hot liquid into the sugar/egg mix.  Continue whisking in a little more hot liquid into the eggs until all of it is added.  This is called tempering and it allows the eggs to slowly and gently be brought up to the same temperature as the hot liquid .
• Return the mixture to the saucepan and place it over medium heat.
• Stir mixture continuously with a wooden spoon, making sure to scrape the bottom of the saucepan to prevent the eggs from scrambling at the bottom.  Cook mixture until it thickens and coats the spoon with a thick enough layer of curd that you can draw your finger through it and it holds a line.  This will take about 5-8 minutes, depending on the heat of your stove.

Remove from heat and strain the curd through a fine sieve.  Scrape curd into a pitcher and pour onto shortbread base above.

Fall 2007 Newsletter

It’s FALL!

Who doesn’t love the summer?  Weekends at the beach, long lazy sunny afternoons, evenings that don’t get dark until 8 or 9…. That said, autumn is always an especially fun time for us at Flour.  We get super excited about all of the new fall pastries that start to come out around this time:  we have pumpkin muffins and orange cranberry muffins; we’re working on a simple sugar cookie to be enjoyed with a hot cup of coffee or tea; our pastry team is hard at work developing some new vegan treats as well (which has nothing to do with fall but we’re jazzed nonetheless!).  All of our students come back from their summer break and many of you are seeing more familiar faces behind the counter.  Plus with fall comes the holiday season (yes we’re already thinking pies and yule logs) which has us busy in the kitchen planning our menu offerings.  A few changes to note over the next few weeks as well - our outdoor seating at Washington Street will be put away as per city regulation in the middle of October.  And we will return to our normal Sunday hours of 9-3 starting this upcoming Sunday October 14.  Please take note!

New deck at Farnsworth Street

For those of you who frequent our Farnsworth Street location, we thank you for your patience over the last several months as our outdoor deck was being constructed.  What was supposed to be a 3 week project ended up taking about 2 months.  But our landlord very kindly constructed an alternate entrance as they were blocking off the original and then a few weeks ago they pieced the whole place back to normal.  So now we have our deck, our seating, and our entrance all as we are used to.  It’s a little late this summer to take advantage of our deck but you can be sure we’ll have a set of outdoor tables and chairs for next spring for all of you to enjoy. 

Happy 7th Anniversary at Washington Street

We celebrated our SEVENTH birthday at Washington Street Flour a few weeks back.  We can hardly believe we’ve been around for that long…no seven-year itch for us!  If anything, we’re more grateful than ever that each day you all come back for more delicious food and friendly service.  So thanks to all of our customers for allowing us to do what we love to do for seven great years!  We hope you came by that day for a mini cupcake…our manager had 7 so if you didn’t get one perhaps he ate yours!  We’ll have a poster board up on the wall with pictures from our birthday celebration with all of our staff members.

New Website

It’s here! Check it out! www.flourbakery.com has been re-worked and improved and we hope you love it as much as we do. Daren Bascomb of the South End who owns a design company called Proverb worked long and hard to make the new site reflect who we are and what we do. We now post each bakery’s specials online by noon each day during the week so that you can check out our daily offerings from your computer. Cool!

9/11 commemorative donation

Each year we donate our 9/11 sales at Washington Street Flour to Project Place and the South End Community Health Center.  This annual offering started in 2001 in our efforts to help local organizations during a time when federal and state funds were understandably diverted to 9/11 causes.  We’ve continued this contribution each year as a small thank-you to these wonderful organizations for helping our neighborhood be a nicer and better place for us to live and work.

Holiday menus and holiday hours

As mentioned above, we’re already thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas!  We will have our Tday menu available starting November 1 and our Christmas menu available starting the weekend after Thanskgiving.  Please be aware that we do close early on Thanksgiving Eve and Christmas Eve…and we are closed entirely for Thanksgiving and they day after Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas and the two days following Christmas.  We love the holidays and we love for our staff to spend time with their families at the holidays as well.  Thanks for understanding!

Salads to go!

While Farnsworth Street is not open during the evening hours with take-out dinner specials, our chef does create a salad to go almost every day to add some variety to your lunch offerings.  We’ve gotten really great feedback from customers on these alternatives to our sandwiches and we encourage you to try them yourself and let us know what you think.

Giada at Flour!

Giada of the Food Network paid us a visit a few weeks ago and will be featuring us in Giada’s Weekend Getaways sometime in early December.  We’re thrilled and honored to be featured and we hope you catch us on the show.  Thanks for your patience during the filming - they took over much of the seating at Farnsworth Street and had many camera members milling around right before a busy lunch period.  It was a lot of fun!

Suggestions

We are always eager to hear from YOU, our wonderful customers, about what we can do to be better for you. We strive every day to offer you a welcoming and warm environment with gracious staff members and scrumptious food. We do feel so fortunate to have such a loyal customer base and we’d love to hear your suggestions! Please don’t hesitate to contact us either in person, by phone, or by email (joanne@flourbakery.com; nicole@flourbakery.com; aaron@flourbakery.com ). Thank you for being the best customers ever!

Spring 2007 Newsletter

Spring Already?

As I’m writing this I’m realizing that the last newsletter we sent out was way back in September. Where did the winter go??

With the longer days and milder temps come a few changes that always make our customers and our staff happier. First, as many of you may already have noticed, we have set up our outdoor patio area! The addition of about 15 new seats means that there’s more room for all of you to spread out and the dining room won’t feel quite so tight all the time. Second, starting April 22nd, we will also switch to our Sunday Summer hours - we typically close at 3pm on Sundays but for the summer we stay open till 5pm. We can’t wait!

Flour 2

We affectionately call our new sibling f2 but please know that it’s actually more like a twin. We’ve done everything we can to make sure that the food and service are the same at our new location as the original. Flour Bakery + Café in Fort Point Channel opened late January with a bang and we’ve been thrilled with the response. Thanks to all of you who have stopped in to say hello - the folks from f1 who transferred over always get a huge kick out of seeing familiar faces among the new customers. And in true Flour fashion, the customers at f2 have become as loyal and welcoming as those at f1. We have our new regulars who stop in several times a day and whose drinks and sandwich preferences we have down to the letter.

Flour at Fort Point is located at 12 Farnsworth Street behind the Children’s museum off of Congress Street. Our hours are 7am-7pm Monday - Friday, 8am-6pm Saturday, and starting on April 8 we will open Sundays from 9am-3pm. The menu is the same although the specials are different - each location’s chef creates his own daily specials based on what he has in-house. We are not offering dinner specials at the new location either…yet. We’ll keep you posted about when that will change.

New Site

With the opening of our second location we realized that our website could use a little sprucing up, especially now that it is representing two Flours. We’ve enlisted the expertise of our very regular customer and friend, Daren Bascome, who owns Proverb in the South End, to help us create a new presence on the web. Daren’s been busily putting together ideas and images and we’re well on our way to a new look online. We hope that our new site will be easier to navigate, that it will hold more information such as staff bios and recipes, and that it will be a closer representation of who we are with more design elements and stories included. It will debut in the next month or so - please check it out and let us know what you think!

New Look

So not only did we decide we needed a new look on the web, we also decided we needed to jazz up our Washington Street location, especially since f2 just opened with glistening new tables, chairs, and counters. Studio FKIA, an amazing design-and-build woodworking outfit in South Boston, helped create the clean and slick new look at f2. They are working on new counters and other areas for f1 which will make the bakery shine. We have also updated our chairs - finally - to a more modern style (the old ones were donated to a local church through a friend of our chef) and we are getting new artwork as well.

Suggestions please

We couldn’t do what we do without the support and feedback from you, our customers. Please continue to let us know how we can be better! We are constantly pushing ourselves to offer even better service with even more delicious food in an even more delightful atmosphere. It’s pretty amazing to us that we can do what we love day-in, day-out and that you all seem to love it as much as we do. Thanks to each of you for your patronage and please don’t hesitate to send us an email or give us a call or talk to us with your suggestions.

Fall 2006 Newsletter

Goodbye Summer!

It seems that we were just telling you that our outdoor patio is open…and now we are getting ready to shut it down. The City allows us to keep the seats outside until around mid-October. As long as the weather cooperates, we’ll keep the chairs and tables out for as long as we can. In the meantime, we’ve stopped our Sunday Summer Hours and are now closing at 3pm, not 5pm. It seems that a lot of customers are still trying to come in the late afternoon on Sundays, so next year we’ll keep our Sunday Summer Hours through September into October as well. Thanks for understanding!

Happy Anniversary Flour

We are 6! On September 26 we will celebrate our 6th anniversary and as is our tradition we will be handing out mini cupcakes to all customers. It’s our way of thanking YOU, our fantastic customers, for coming to see us every day, every week, every month. We couldn’t have made it to six amazing years without all of your support and suggestions. Please come see us on our birthday and enjoy a treat on us!

Recipe Sharing

New Items

With the change in seasons comes a new array of items to tempt you! As the weather gets cooler we’ll be re-introducing our bran muffin and our pumpkin muffin into the mix. At some point rhubarb and raspberries will fall out of season and we’ll say goodbye to our rhubarb-raspberry pound cake. We’ve recently started a fantastic new pastry called Butter Breton Cake, or kouign-amman for those in the know. It’s a souped-up croissant, essentially - butter, yeast and sugar folded and folded and folded together to make a scrumptious, flaky, butter treat. Our apricot almond bar pairs sliced almonds with tangy apricot jam and apricot halves all on a shortbread crust - delicious! We just started selling ice cream cookie sandwiches - two cookies with a vanilla bean ice cream in between. We’d love to hear what you think! By customer request, mint oreos are in; peanut butter oreos are out. And for all of those who have been clamoring for butterscotch pudding and chocolate pudding and other custards, we are bringing each of them back one by one for guest appearances. We featured a milk chocolate crème brulee, then we re-introduced the butterscotch pudding, then chocolate pudding…what’s next? Wait and see! And as it gets cooler and cooler we’ll bring back some more of our popular winter items such as craquelin and apple brioche. We’d love to hear of other ideas and treats you’d like to see here at Flour.

Donations

Every year we commemorate 9/11 by donating our sales for that day to two local organizations that are near to us both literally and emotionally, the South End Community Health Center and Project Place. This year we made out two checks of $2500 each to these two organizations and we couldn’t have done it without your support and patronage. Thank you!

Daily and Dinner Specials

Just a reminder that we post our daily specials along with our weekly dinner specials online at www.flourbakery.com. Check them out and come on in!

Flour2 Update

As we mentioned in the last newsletter, we are opening a second Flour in the winter, hopefully by the beginning of December. We are thrilled and excited to be able to bring Flour treats and smiles to another neighborhood. You’ll see some familiar faces at the new place as we transfer a few people over to help us out. The location is Fort Point Channel behind the Children’s Museum; the time frame is early December if all the stars are aligned. Please come see us at our new location and spread the word among your friends! As always we invite comments and questions on our food, service, this newsletter, the color of the bathroom walls, anything and everything! We feel so lucky to be able to be doing what we love — offer delicious food with warm welcoming service — every day to our customers, and we’d love to hear how we can do better. Thank you for coming to see us!!

Spring 2006 Newsletter

Warm weather is finally here!

And with the warm weather comes the unveiling of the outdoor patio, the commencement of our Sunday summer hours, and the introduction of new summer time items. Many of you have already enjoyed a cappuccino or grilled roast chicken sandwich out in our outdoor seating area; for those of you who haven’t we invite you to spend some time people-watching and partaking in Flour treats a fresco. Our patio is open till 9pm during the weekdays, 6pm on Saturdays and 5pm on Sundays.

“Till 5pm on Sunday??” I can hear you say. Yes we are now open from 9am until 5pm on Sunday for the summer! And don’t forget that we are also open until 9pm every weeknight with a take-out dinner special menu that changes weekly. Check them out online at http://www.flourbakery.com/ and click under “dinner specials.”

We will be adding a new roster of summer items to go along with the warmer weather. As soon as berries and melons come in season, we’ll feature fresh fruit cups each morning. We’ve already gotten a lot of enthusiastic feedback for our raspberry-rhubarb pound cakes - we’ll keep these on until spring rhubarb becomes scarce and then we’ll move onto some of the berries and stonefruits that come available during the summer. An apricot streusal bar is in the works as is an apricot cream cheese brioche. We’ve bid adieu to the apple honey buns but we’ll bring them back in the fall. Corn muffins have replaced bran muffins and plum tarts will make an appearance when plums become plentiful. The summer is a really fun season for bakers, and we hope you’ll enjoy the new products as much as we enjoy creating them.

July Closing

Every July we close for a short period to rest and renovate. This July we will be close starting Tuesday July 4 until Saturday July 8, reopening for business on Sunday July 9. We hope to make some minor changes to our appearance so let us know if you like the new look.

Employee News

We’ve got some great family news to report! Congratulations to Jim Morris on the birth of his son Michael James Morris. We’ve got pictures of little Mikey out front near the cash register if you want to see him.

And congratulations to Aaron to his upcoming nuptials in July to fiancee Melissa and to Michelle for her wedding to fiance Colin the following week. Whoowee!!

Flour2

We swore it would never happen…Flour2 is on the way! We are wildly excited about bringing Flour food and friendliness to a whole new neighborhood - we’ll be a few miles away in the Fort Point Channel area. For those of you not familiar with this area, you will be soon: the new ICA is opening up there this summer, the new convention center has been booked several years out, the Children’s Museums is expanding their current location, several new hotels and shopping areas are being planned, along with a number of new residential areas with lofts and condos galore. We plan on offering much of the same menu there as we do here, and you’ll see some familiar faces there as we transfer some people over to help us with the expansion. But don’t worry: Flour will remain the same here - we’ll always be dedicated to bringing you the best food and the friendliest service we can. We’ll just be doing it in two places! We hope to open by the late summer or early fall of this year.

Commonly Asked Questions

A few newsletters back I answered a bunch of questions that we regularly get from customers and some people have asked that I reprint those answers. So here they are. And we’d love to hear from you as well - questions, suggestions, ideas, problems, anything. Let us know how we can continue to make your Flour experience as wonderful as we can! Email us here, drop us a note in our suggestion bin, or talk to me or a manager on your next visit. Hope to see you again soon and as always thank you for your patronage!

a. suggestion: can you make bagels?
Homemade bagels are delicious and personally they are one of my favorite things to eat. As with any offering, for us to make homemade bagels we would have to make and sell a certain number of them to justify the labor involved. And unfortunately that number is fairly high. That’s why there are entire stores devoted to bagels — you have to sell a LOT of bagels before you break even. So while we would love to offer bagels for our customers and we would love to experiment with making them, it would be difficult for us to include them in our menu unless we were willing to commit to making dozens and dozens of them. Right now we don’t have the space or the staff to do so. We often suggest our country roll, raisin pecan roll or multigrain roll to those of you looking for bagels.

b. suggestion: why don’t you offer full sized cakes in the case?
We are committed to only offering the freshest of pastries and that includes our cakes. When we put cakes in the case for sale, sometimes customers buy them and sometimes they don’t. Then we are left with the problem of what to do with cakes that don’t sell. If we keep trying to sell it, it becomes at some point stale, old, and not up to snuff. If we throw it away, well that’s not a great option either. So what we have decided is to ask our customers to order cakes in advance so they can be prepared specifically for you without compromising freshness. We do sell carrot cakes and dacquoise from the case on a regular basis, and on the weekends we make a point of making a chocolate cake or two for the last minute customer who is in need of a full cake.

c. suggestion: can you get another register to help the long lines?
We would LOVE another register. It bothers us as much as you, if not more, when we see a line that snakes through the dining room and outside. We love that our customers are so loyal to us but we feel your pain when you have to wait in a long line for your order! However, as always, it becomes a question of space. We physically have no space for another register. If we were to have another register, we would not have as much space for all of our pastries and cakes. We’ve thought and thought about how to get around this, and if you have any ideas we’d love to hear them. Our solution has been to focus on training our counter staff to be efficient and quick so that they can get you through the line as quickly as possible.

d. suggestion: please make such-and-such new product.
We love our customer product suggestions! We’ve tried to introduce as many as we can - peanut butter oreos, granola parfaits, lowfat chocolate cakes, cheddar scallion scones — these are all regular menu offerings that started out as suggestions on a suggestion slip. We read all suggestions carefully and do try to include as many as we can. Because we offer so many different items and because our space in the kitchen is tight, if we introduce a new item we often have to remove an old item. So if you make a suggestion it may take us time to phase it in since we have to figure out what we are phasing out. But keep the suggestions coming; they help us in achieving our goal which is to make great food that our customers love.

Winter 2005/Early Spring 2006 Newsletter

Happy new year (and happy Chinese new year - Year of the Dog)

The crazy holiday season has come and gone, and we at Flour Bakery want to thank all of you for your loyal patronage. If you ordered holiday items from us and have feedback to help us with next year’s holiday menu, we’d love to hear from you. Now as we enter a new year, we are re-energized and jazzed about continuing to offer you the best possible food and service we can. We’ve been extremely fortunate in having customers who come again and again; we want you to know that we don’t take any of you for granted. From the early morning “Table” crew to the residents who come for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the commuters and hospital folks who stop in on their way home, we are grateful to each of you. Each day we push ourselves to see how we can make the service smoother, quicker and more welcoming, and the food even more delicious and scrumptious.

New extended hours

We hear you, we hear you! Since introducing our dinner menu almost a year ago, customers have been clamoring for us to stay open later 5 nights a week rather than just 3. Sounds like a good idea to us, so starting Monday, February 6, our hours of operation will be 7am-9pm Monday -Friday, 8am-6pm on Saturday, and 9am-3pm on Sunday. That means that you can pick up dinner and desserts from us each weeknight! We are excited that you’ve responded so warmly to our dinners and look forward to offering them Monday through Friday. We are making some adjustments to our dinner offerings…read on….

Dinner service update

We’ve been thrilled with the reception of the dinner menu. So many of you have told us how much you enjoy picking up dinners and desserts here and how we’ve made cooking in your own kitchens obsolete. We have noticed, however, that most of you take these dinners to go and heat them up and eat them at home. While we’d love to have you here in our dining room, being homebodies ourselves we fully understand wanting to just get take-out and go home and curl up on the couch. (Okay, maybe that’s just me!)

Thus in order to streamline the dinner process, rather than make you wait for us to cook your dinner just so you can go home and re-heat it, we’ve decided to offer all our dinner items already prepared to be heated up at home. You won’t have to wait anymore; you can just point to the item you want and take it with you.

We’ll offer whole roast chickens to go, along with separate containers of roasted vegetables and chef’s choice of potatoes. We’ll also continue to offer at least 2 dinner specials that one person can eat as a meal, such as beef and ginger stirfry or angel hair pasta with shredded chicken, parmesan and basil. We hope you enjoy the new set-up and would love to hear what you think.

New items

A baker’s work is never done. On a recent trip to Paris, I ate croissants that almost made me cry, they were so flaky and buttery and tender. I came back with a vow to make ours just as amazing. I’m happy to say that as of tomorrow, the croissants that we are making are ones that you’d be proud to offer to a Parisian. For those of you who’ve had our croissants in the past and not been wowed, we urge you to try again and hopefully we’ll change your mind!

Previously you had to work at Flour in order to enjoy the guilty pleasure of eating raw Flour chocolate chip cookie dough. Now we extend that indulgence to all of our customers by selling our cookie dough in containers-to-go. We’ve got baking instructions right on the container; each one kilogram container of dough makes about 20-24 cookies and sells for $14. Currently we’re offering chocolate chip and oatmeal. If you want others just let us know. Please note that the dough does contain raw eggs so if you are avoiding raw eggs you should bake the dough off as cookies.

The new dinner format means that we’ll be able to introduce several new pastry items a week to be sold in the afternoon and evening crowd. Lately we’ve been in love with making sweet pizzas - tender slightly chewy pizza dough topped with various sweet toppings. We’ve done chocolate and hazelnut; and roasted pear, ricotta, walnut and honey. We hope to offer a new pizza every few weeks or so. Check it out!

Upcoming events

Project Place is a neighborhood non-profit that is dedicated to helping homeless individuals lead self-sufficient lives. They do an incredible job of working one-on-one with clients training them on how to get a job and find housing. Several times a year they host various fundraising events to help raise money for their efforts. On February 5 they’ll be hosting their annual Gospel Brunch at the Fairmont Copley Hotel. Flour Bakery, along with a number of area restaurants, is donating brunch items; 2-3 gospel groups will perform; a grand time will be had by all. It’s always a very popular event and attendees always return the following year. For more information and to purchase tickets ($60 in advance/$70 at the door) please contact Elizabeth Mullaly at 617-262-3740. Hope to see you there!

On February 9 Flour Bakery will be participating in a fundraiser for the Asian American Civic Association. The AACA is developing a new civic center on 87 Tyler Street and proceeds from this event will go towards this effort. We will join Ming Tsai and other chefs in providing samplings of our menus; a cultural entertainment program is also planned. For more information contact Mary Chin at marychin@aaca-boston.org.

Finally February 14 is Valentine’s Day; don’t forget your honey! We will be offering cupcakes and desserts and especially our famous sweetheart cookies. Each cookie is hand-frosted and decorated with a special message ranging from “Be Mine” and “True Love Always” to much more X-rated messages. Please come visit us and take a look!

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions to this newsletter or to anything we do at Flour, please don’t hesitate to write to Joanne at joanne@flourbakery.com or Aaron our manager at aaron@flourbakery.com. Thank you and happy new year!

Fall 2005

Hurricane Katrina

All of us here at Flour are devastated, shocked, and saddened by the scale of tragedy that we have witnessed in this past week with Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath. Each person is involved in his or her own way in helping the relief efforts. Jake, our resident rock star, is playing at three benefit fundraisers; he is selling his CD (Cyanide Valentine) here at Flour and donating those sales to New Orleans. Heidi is opening her home to friends who were stranded and left homeless by the hurricane. Many of our counter staff members are donating their tips to relief efforts.

We are donating our sales from September 2 entirely to relief funds. At times like these we are reminded of how we are all linked together and how we must work together to help those in desperate need.

Dinner service

What started off as somewhat of an experiment for us has grown into a full-fledged, bustling part of Flour: dinner service! We are thrilled at the response we’ve received from customers and for those of you not familiar with our dinner offering, please check out the menu every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It is posted online (www.flourbakery.com) starting every Wednesday and on our front door as well.

Our dinner service was featured in the September issue of Bon Appetit (in which the article raved about our buttermilk fried chicken and huckleberry tart) and we also won a 2005 Best of Boston award for Best Takeout for our dinners. Our chef, Aniceto, and our cooks work hard every week to create delicious, fresh and simple meals for you to enjoy here at Flour or take home to eat. We hope to see you here!

New items

With the fall season comes a change in our rotating muffin selection. We will be phasing out our Ginger Peach muffin and introducing a more seasonal selection. On the roster are the return of the Bran and Good Morning muffin, as well as the Pumpkin Spice. We’ve recently introduced homemade granola parfaits in response to customer requests for a more healthy start to the morning. The parfait consists of layers of nonfat vanilla yogurt, homemade granola and fresh fruit. And of course every week we create a new dessert offering or two as part of our dinner menu.

On the savory front, we are taking out the Grilled Vegetable sandwich and introducing a Hummus, Cucumber and Tomato sandwich as a substitute. The Tuna sandwich is changing as well — this is still in the works in the kitchen. And a popular sandwich from the past, the Grilled Italian, will be making a reappearance on a semi-regular basis. You’ll see these changes in the next few weeks or so — let us know what you think!

Upcoming Events

We are participating in a Progressive Dinner benefiting the Children’s Hospital on Saturday October 15 in Plymouth, MA. Along with Chefs Barbara Lynch, Marc Orfaly, and Michael Schlow, Joanne will be creating a course (dessert of course!) for attendants to enjoy as they get a sneak peek at a new community that has been developed called the Pinehills. We are making chocolate pudding parfaits, lemon meringue tartlettes and mini cookies. For more information, contact 888-209-8880.

On Thursday November 3, we are participating in a fundraiser at the Westin Hotel in Waltham called REACH, which is the only emergency domestic violence shelter program serving 27 cities and towns in Greater Boston. For more information please call 617-331-7676.