13005 SW 1st Road Suite 137
Also available at Wards Supermarket and local Farmers' Markets
In my opinion, the Flour Pot Bakery is yet another Gainesville installment of "where do they get off thinking they can run a food service business?" I picture the owner baking her special ginger snaps for company holiday parties to half sincere responses of "ohh, these are sooo good, you should totally open a bakery," and doing just that. Places like Flour Pot are most likely run by people who quit the corporate work-a-day world to realize their dream of running a bakery or a bar or a yoga studio or a spice store or a knitting shop. In other words, they're not qualified in any way for their job. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they did go to culinary school and pass with a C average, who knows. All I'm saying is that the baked goods here aren't good. They should be called "baked mediorcres."
Also, to continue our running theme; the name is a play on words. Now class, what have we learned this means? It means that the creativity of the food isn't enough to sell the place. It means it's not that good!
When you break it down, the real problem with Flour Pot is their lack of oomph, distinction, and flavor. The sweet items aren't sweet enough and the savory ones are hardly savory.
Here's some of what I've had and what I think about them:
-Oatmeal Raisin cookies: I love Oatmeal Raisin cookies. Wards sells freshly baked ones from the Flour Pot and I'm always suckered into buying at least 3. Having eaten so many of these over such a long period of time, I'm convinced that their recipe is eyeballed and not precise. The sweetness and seasoning (cinnamon, etc) are never the same. Most of the time, the cookies are not sweet enough and are kinda bland. On rare occasion, they pull them off just fine with the right amount of sugar. Also, the consistency varies significantly, with some days being firm and crispier and others being soft and doughy.
-Ginger Cookies: Ginger cookies are another tasty treat unless you're buying them from Flour Pot. They're thick and gooey, but not in a good way. They're also chock full of jellied ginger bits that don't really help. It might just be a textural thing, but I don't like biting into a big gooey chunk of something when I'm already eating a pretty soft, doughy cookie.
-Rosemary Bread: While this item smells great, it's very timidly flavored. If you want to taste how savory rosemary bread can be, go to Uppercrust and skip right over Flour Pot. It's almost as if they have never tasted their own bread to realize the flavors aren't strong enough.
-Quiche Provençale: I went to their actual location one day for breakfast and had the quiche. Now, I'm not sure about the whole real men don't eat quiche thing, but they surely shouldn't eat bad quiche. It was baked some time ago and tasted like it had been sitting out for quite a while. It wasn't very flavorful (big surprise!) and was quite dense.
-Pumpkin "empanada": This was clearly intended as a dessert. The dough was croissant dough covered in thick sugar crystals. The inside was supposed to be like pumpkin pie filling, but it wasn't very sweet. It was also kinda sour, but not intentionally, which was a bizarre juxtaposition with the very rich dough. A very odd concoction.
Just to prove that I'm not crazy, I pulled the above photo from someone's blog. They were actually commenting on how their croissants look better than Flour Pot's.
All in all, this bakery is no good. It's a waste of dough. Go get your fresh, locally baked bread from Uppercrust and forget about Flour Pot.
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