Rye bread & sourdough
FEBRUARY 2026
Where do you find bolted flour in Philadelphia? (Inta Grunde and Valdis Bašēns)
Philadelphia, USA
Excerpt from an interview with Inta Grunde and Valdis Bašēns in Philadelphia, USA, in 2015, when the museum met them during a field expedition:
Inta: My mother always looked for what she called bolted flour. Not the dark rye flour, but bolted flour. It’s very hard to find here. I have to drive half an hour north to a kind of warehouse, where I have to place a special order. Then I buy 100 pounds at a time. Because the dark rye flour we can buy in small bags here and there, but the bolted flour we can’t.
Valdis: About that flour – we lived, when we first arrived, in a place where there were many Estonians and many Japanese, and also Latvians. And in the local grocery store you could get exactly that kind of flour. For years all the Estonian and Latvian women went there to buy it. And when the owner retired and closed the shop – now it’s desperation. Where do you get it?