Joining the Cult of King Arthur

By Emily Esterson, 12-09-07

	Caption: Dough set to rise

A couple of weeks ago, my husband asked me what I needed from the supermarket. He had to pick up a few things. If you’re a regular NewWest.Net reader you may be familiar with my obsession with bread baking, and particularly lately, multi-day starters and ferments and so forth. Horrifyingly, I’d run out of flour. My husband knows how snobby I can be about ingredients, so he asked me what brand to get: “Ideally, King Arthur bread flour, but they don’t carry it, so just get something better than store brand.”

In case you’re not familiar with King Arthur Flour, it’s grown and milled in the U.S., and doesn’t contain any icky things like bromate or other additives. It’s natural. The company is based in Norwich, Vermont, not far from where I spent both my college years and many summers. I first learned about King Arthur from my sister, who lives in New England and is sanctimoniously organic about nearly everything. She bought me a gift certificate to King Arthur’s baking catalog last Christmas. It is full of delightful goodies like pie shields and dough whisks and razor blades made for scoring baguettes. Definitely at the top of my catalog porn pile.

Well, Scot returned from the local Albertson’s (a sad store in a poor neighborhood, that stocks an organic carrot or two once every six months) with bags upon bags of King Arthur (what, were we preparing for nuclear winter?)—bread, whole wheat, all purpose. When had my local Albertson’s, the store that hip food trends completely forgot, started stocking hip New England flour?

And not a week later, I notice a little announcement in the New Mexican about free baking classes. Sponsored by, you guessed it, King Arthur Flour. Reporter that I am, I realized that something’s going on here. So I trundle on over to a hotel conference room on a Wednesday night, thinking I might be the only fan of the product and the only person in the world who obsesses about things like the consistency of my poolish (a word I confess I learned just a few weeks back). But no. The room was nearly full of people of all ages and ethnicities (although skewing heavily toward middle aged, anglo). And we were riveted.

No only did our instructor, Carolyn (whose role in the company wasn’t fully explained to us), treat us to some really great secrets and demonstrations of kneading techniques, but she kept the product pitching to a self-deprecating minimum. When someone asked where to get that dough whisk she was using, she merely laughed and said, “There’s this little store in Vermont.” Okay, we get the idea. Nothing is really for free. But it’s better than sitting through a timeshare presentation in Vegas.

I learned. I learned a lot! Here’s five things I’m doing wrong with my bread and my poolish. And this is important, oh Rocky Mountain bread bakers:

1) I’m using the wrong kind of yeast! Rapid rise is NOT the same as instant yeast. Rapid rise, bad. Instant, okay. Cake, the best.

2) I’m probably letting my dough rise for too long. It never occurred to me that at 5,000 feet, my dough would rise faster than at sea level. DOH! I have never modified my recipe according to altitude. I’ve been baking in the Rockies for 20 years. 

3) I’m probably using too much yeast for the same reason as number 2.

4) I’m probably over-kneading it. I really take the recipe seriously when it says to knead for eight minutes. Carolyn’s advice? 3 to 5, tops.

5) I’m using too much flour. Carolyn’s mantra for rustic bread: Don’t use too much flour. Don’t use too much flour. And...freeze the whole wheat flour. And knead wet dough with floured fingertips. Don’t forget to flick.  I could go on, but I won’t.

All these conjoining incidents—the sudden appearance of King Arthur in my supermarket, the arrival of the gurus themselves to teach New Mexicans (they’re on a multi-city tour) to use their products, the rampant distribution of coupons—made me wonder about what’s going on with that company. So I asked. Yes, the company’s press liaison, Allison E. Rogers Furbish, wrote in an email, New Mexico is a new market for the company. They’re “expanding everywhere we can!” A decade ago, Furbish writes, the flour was only available in New England. She says King Arthur is the only major flour company right now that’s actually growing sales and market share. “We noticed an upsurge in our sales following 9/11, as one example of what’s pushing people in that direction. I think people also are becoming more and more interested in what’s in their food and where it’s coming from—particularly with some of the food safety issues consumers have encountered recently.”

Interestingly, King Arthur’s free classes are sponsored partially by Stonyfield Farm, the New Hampshire-based natural yogurt company. I wrote intensively about Stonyfield when I worked for food trade and business magazines in the 1990s. Back then, Gary Hirshberg, the founder, was an upstart and the company a startup, but I was always impressed by its ability to actually walk the organic and natural walk. My Inc. Magazine story about Hirshberg ran alongside a not-so-nice example about how Ben and Jerry’s was not able to actually source their Rainforest Crunch from the rainforest. While researching that story, I visited Hirshberg’s New Hampshire home and found it to be made of logs harvested from the land it was built on. He’s good friends with Al Gore (or he was, anyway, circa 1995-6-7). The point is, it’s kind of nice to actually admire the companies whose products you purchase. It says something about the food you eat — especially if you can’t mill your own bread flour or milk your own yogurt cows — to know that the people are likable, ethical and try to do the right thing. That’s how I’m feeling about King Arthur — that their products are good, both in soul and in quality. So I was pleased to know the baking classes were also quite informative.  Okay, the free giveaways weren’t bad, either. I’ve been bribed. Give me a bag of good flour, and I’ll be your friend for life.

As to why King Arthur’s been so successful, I have to once again quote Furbish (and yes, I know this is a gushy article, but when something really is good, and cool, why not say so?) “We believe in the capacity of baking to create companionship and community, and that’s what we strive for through our business. Maybe it’s working.”