King Arthur Flour's baking hotline is here for your sourdough starter and your quarantine loneliness
Issue 170: Call them at (855) 371-BAKE for baking tips and the much-needed promise of friendly human connection.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter that plops in your inbox every Monday through Thursday.
Read last Thursday’s dispatch: On the task at hand for BA Test Kitchen video fans like me
Well, I suppose this is more of a dessert-time-ish newsletter today (and what is time, anyway?), so I wanted to share a dessert-adjacent article I read.
I usually buy King Arthur flour, and on every bag, there’s a phone number. Call (855) 371-BAKE, and the company promises to connect you to a professional baker who can answer all your questions and quandaries. Personally, I’ve never called it. But maybe I should — apparently, during quarantine, people are discovering in droves that it’s a pure, kind, generous service that goes beyond just fixing your sourdough.
the homepage of the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Hotline
A lovely Eater article about the hotline amid the COVID pandemic reported that, in April, the hotline received over 10,000 calls — shooting past the usual peak volume around the holiday season. For those playing along at home, that’s about a call every 90 seconds to two minutes. The hotline is staffed by 15 people, many with culinary degrees and professional pastry experience. And before the pandemic, most of the calls came from older folks, regular bakers, some so-called “frequent fliers” who just wanted to talk.
During the quarantine, people have been spending way more time at home — which means more time, more baking, more mistakes, more loneliness. Erin Berger, who reported the Eater story, explains:
Imagine you can’t leave your house, see your more cooking-inclined family, or even get through to most customer service lines — but there is one line that promises, seven days a week, to connect you with an actual human who will earnestly try to help you out, no matter how specific your problem. “On a daily basis we hear from people who just don’t know who else to call and they saw our number on the bag of flour that they have in their hand,” says Pochop.
She offers this heart-rending and beautiful observation:
Baked goods in particular are so often tied up with nostalgia and relationships; people seem especially anxious about messing up recipes that their loved ones usually made, or just want to talk to someone — anyone — about how much a recipe means to them. A caller may technically be asking about how to halve a recipe, but what they really want to talk about is how they’d usually make a full recipe to share with their grandchildren.
My heart!
As a culture, we have become so accustomed to the unrelenting frustration of calling a company for help and instead being deposited deep inside a robotic labyrinth. But sometimes, when we need it, there is a real person on the other end of the line, sitting in Norwich, Vermont. A real person who can offer not just free baking advice but the reliability of human connection, which the pandemic has shaken up.
One other thing King Arthur Flour offers? Gorgeous glamor shots of their recipes, with an aesthetic that feels at once a perfectly composed romanticization of rustic country life and a messily accessible baking project. I love it. (Each photo here is linked to its recipe. And hey, just call (855) 371-BAKE if you get stuck; I probably will be. Happy baking!)
photos via King Arthur Flour
