Eater looks into how King Arthur dealt with everyone baking through the pandemic.

The thing is, the great flour shortage wasn’t a flour shortage at all. Our national grain stockpile wasn’t depleted, and flour still flowed in train cars and trucks and pallets. For King Arthur, the impact in the early months was small. The virus hadn’t yet reached the mills it works with, clustered in breadbasket states; Heald says none of their mill partners had staff out sick with COVID-19 or waiting on test results until much later. In the spring and summer, everyday people couldn’t buy flour because of tight bottlenecks in a national logistics system built around the logic of consumerism. The problem wasn’t the flour. The problem was getting it into bags.

The solution King Arthur used: promise every mill they work with that they’d buy whatever they could produce. Even then, they quickly ran into the problem of how to source enough bags! All told, King Arthur sold a lot of flour this year.

In related, feel-good baking news is this wonderful profile of Sarah House, the in-house baker extraordinaire and recipe writer for Bob’s Red Mill.