Craving sticky buns from Flour bakery? Or a big slab of their famous banana bread? We get you. As many denizens of the North Shore are skipping the office in Boston and working from home, trips to Flour Bakery—Joanne Chang’s palaces of pastries—have also sadly fallen by the wayside. So the chef has teamed up with CK Pearl in Essex to offer a pastry pop up this Saturday, October 24.
“We realized this summer that guests who were joining us regularly before the pandemic aren’t able to come to Flour as often as they used to,” Chang says. “Many people who don’t live in Boston/Cambridge just aren’t traveling to the city right now. With the pop-up series in general, our goal is to bring Flour to our guests to enjoy at home.”
Go all in with the CK Pearl and Flour BBQ dinner for four, which includes CK Pearl bbq meats and brie + bacon mac and cheese with homemade pasta, alongside Flour’s black kale coleslaw and a Flour chocolate cream pie for dessert. The meal serves six to eight and costs $125.
Or you can order your fill of donuts, coffee cake, and banana bread, a build-your-own breakfast kit for four, or a pastry sampler, which includes one each of their sticky bun, parmesan chive scone, banana bread, blueberry muffin, currant scone, and chocolate brioche.
Over the summer, Flour popped up down the Cape, and in Hingham, Chestnut Hill, Somerville, Charlestown, and Natick.
The Essex collaboration came about because CK Pearl Owner Patrick Shea worked for Mike Brucklier, the director of operations for Flour—but it wasn’t Flour’s first time collaborating with a North Shore business. The Lynn-based flour mill One Mighty Mill made an appearance on the bakery’s Flour Love Instagram live baking series (#flourlove), providing ingredients for the Chubby Rocco—a sweet and salty hunk of goodness packed with chocolate chips and One Mighty Mill whole grain pretzels—not to mention the company’s flour, of course.
“We created the Chubby Rocco to really highlight One Mighty Mill,” Chang says, noting that you can buy a kit on the Flour website to make them at home. “We’ve been using milled-for-us wheat flour from One Mighty Mill for the last few years in several items, including our banana bread, brownies, and blueberry muffins. It’s incredibly fresh and earthy, and is also full of fiber and nutrients.”
This will be the last Flour pop-up until January, and both Chang and Shea hope Flour will return to the North Shore then. “Although there is nothing set in stone right now, the CK Pearl team would love to work with Flour again this winter,” Shea says. “This pop-up has CK Pearl eager for the possibility of future collabs with other businesses.”
Want to make sure you get what you want? Place your order by Thursday night at 8 p.m. sharp at Flour’s website, flourbakery.com. While there will be limited supplies of baked goods available for walk-up, those may go fast! Most orders will be preorders with a cutoff date/time of Thursday, October 22 at 8 p.m. sharp.