A small Boston bakehouse that started at a kitchen table.

I am Alaleh. I am a civil engineer, and I design infrastructure in Boston. During quarantine, like a lot of people, I started baking at home. I kept going after most people stopped.

What held me was a habit from work: change one thing at a time and pay attention. When I changed the flour, everything changed. The same recipe with fresh stone-milled spelt or einkorn had a different smell, a different color, a different crumb. I started chasing that.

I grew up in an Iranian home where bread was on the table before anything else. It was how you told people they were welcome. I still think of baking that way: a plain, practical way to take care of someone.

Every recipe here starts with choosing the grain. Einkorn makes a tender, golden banana bread. Bolted spelt keeps a pumpkin loaf moist. Whole rye deepens the flavor of chocolate.

The grains are organic, stone-milled in the Northeast, and grown with regenerative practices: cover crops, rotations, no synthetic inputs. That kind of farming builds soil, and better soil grows grain with more flavor. I work with growers and mills like Farmer Ground Flour, Maine Grains, and Ground Up Grain. How a grain is grown and milled changes a bake more than anything else in the bowl, so that is where I spend my attention.

I first sold at farmers markets. People tried the cookies and the banana bread, came back the next week, and kept asking the same question: how do I get this when the market is not on?

The baking mixes and the frozen ready-to-bake goods are my answer. They use the same ingredients as the market bakes. I do the sourcing, blending, portioning, and testing. You do the baking. The mixes have everything dry in the bag, and you add a few fresh ingredients. The frozen cookies, scones, and biscuits go from your freezer to the oven with no thawing.

I blend and portion at CommonWealth Kitchen in Dorchester, a shared kitchen that helps small food businesses get started. Anchor & Rye took first prize in its Ready to Launch pitch competition.

I buy grain as close to home as I can. Working regionally keeps flour fresh and traceable, and it keeps a small grain economy alive: farmers who grow varieties chosen for flavor, and millers who still work with stones. Frozen goods are delivered in Greater Boston and carried by a few cafés, farm stores, and markets. The mixes ship nationwide.

The anchor is for Boston, where I live and work, and for staying grounded in a place. The rye is for the grains that have fed people here for generations. Together they say where the ingredients come from and how they are treated.

If you bake something you love, I would like to hear about it.