Thursday, March 20, 2008

King Arthur jumps the shark

I buy a lot of baking supplies and equipment from King Arthur: I like their bread flour, which is more expensive than most in the local supermarket, but consistently gives good results. I like the fact that they carry danish bread whisks, bulk yeast etc.
And they have a lovely cookbook: typically good baking recipes.
This morning, in anticipation of perhaps making hot cross buns tomorrow (not going to happen now, for various reasons) I started looking through my dozens of baking books to see which had recipes, to pick several, modify, merge and mix to my tastes.
To my great surprise most of them don't have recipes for them.
But my biggest surprise was that King Arthur flour, bastion of "make it at home, from scratch" doesn't have a recipe for them. It does have a recipe for Hot Cross Muffins, however: it assures us that this will give us the characteristic flavour in one third of the time.

(Aside: "jumping the shark" refers to the episode of Happy Days when everyone knew the series was finished: the Fonz, on waterskis, jumping over a shark)


Yours, amused.
N.

5 comments:

PJH said...

Hi - Check out kingarthurflour.com - we have three different hot cross bun recipes online. Maybe too late for now, but bookmark for next year! Thanks for the cookbook mention-

BreadBox said...

PJ: sorry if the post sounded a little snarky: I really do like the cookbook and the supplies and ingredients: re-reading the post this morning it appears that I didn't seem to hit the humour note that I was looking for. Mind you, LOML and I did get a huge laugh out of the muffins-not-buns fact!

N.

~A~ said...

I saw the weirdest thing yesterday at Wal-Mart to buy more flour for the cookies I was baking. They're stocking King Arthur flour. So I bought some because I'm too cheep to order it online.

I just had to share that.

BreadBox said...

~A~: actually, the flour I buy in my local grocery store (and it has been painful, incredibly painful, to watch the impact of gas prices on the price of KA flour --- from $1.39 to $3.09 in less than four years or so) since the shipping costs would make it prohibitive to buy online. Yeast, on the other hand... I buy it several pounds at a time and store it in the freezer.
By the way, how much was the KA flour at WM? They never used to stock it here in the back of beyond...

N.

~A~ said...

$2.68 for a 5 lb bag. A little more expesive than the Gold Metal brand I usually buy. I haven't noticed flour prices rising in store yet, but I've been waiting for it.