The One Flour You Should Buy, According to a Professional Bread Maker
After just a quick rundown of Aaron Quint’s resume, it’s abundantly clear that the self-professed gluten-obsessive has baked bread using practically every single flour out there. The former amateur baker (turned pizza-cookbook author, turned artisan-bread-maker in Kingston, New York) is what you might call an expert at making dough — which, more often than not, requires the powdery pantry staple.
If you believe that flour doesn’t vary much from brand to brand, we (and Aaron) politely disagree.
Buy: King Arthur Flour, $15 for two, five-pound bags
Aaron’s bread-baking success is owed, in large part, to a certain pantry staple, which we also happen to be very big fans of: King Arthur Flour. We 100 percent believe that bread made with King Arthur Flour actually tastes different (in a good way!) than the same recipe made with another flour. The inside gets fluffier, the crust gets crustier!
We caught up with Aaron, who runs Kingston Bread Lab, a pop-up run out of a local bookstore-slash-bar Rough Draft, to talk about why he considers KAF to be one of the best in the business. Here’s what he had to say about it.
On switching from generic flour to King Arthur.
For a long time I was a baker at home and bought generic flour at the supermarket, which is totally fine and usable. There’s a big movement among artisan bakers to try to rebuild local grain economies and support smaller mills and farms. King Arthur Flour is a smaller company (compared to other popular brands) based in Vermont and I always find it to be fresh, consistent, and high quality.
On the special qualities of King Arthur flour.
I find King Arthur flour to be a strong flour, meaning it contains a lot of gluten which helps your bread to rise and have that open crumb structure that you want. Store-bought, mass-produced flours don’t give you the same texture or crust that you want in a classic French-style baguette.
On why it’s okay to mix certain types of flours.
In addition to using King Arthur flour as my base, I augment my doughs with freshly milled whole-wheat flours from other local mills like Farmer Ground Flour and Champlain Valley Milling. I appreciate being able to mix them with King Arthur bread flour, which allows the flavor to come through but still maintains enough strength in the dough.
King Arthur Flour made it onto our list of our 100 most essential groceries. See the list here.