[bright upbeat music] I'm here with Joshua Bellamy, one of the co-owners and bakers here at Boulted Bread Downtown Raleigh.

And I'm just loving your new location.

- Thank you.

- Were you guys able to bring the stone mill with you?

- So, we actually have a brand new stone mill here.

It's about 48 inches wide, about twice as wide as our former one, and we're able to mill about twice as much flour on it now for our brand new shop.

But our original mill is actually up in Vermont, sort of getting a facelift, and we'll have that here hopefully in the next few months as well.

- Great.

More milling, more flour, more bread.

- Yeah, more fresh flour, exactly, yeah, yeah.

- [Deborah] Is there a reason why you guys mill your own flour?

- Flour is just like any other ingredient.

The fresher it is, the more nutritious it is, the more flavorful it is, and the more aromatic it is.

So by milling it here and then using it within hours of when we mill it, we get a loaf of bread and we get a croissant that are ideally a little bit more flavorful than they would be otherwise.

- [Deborah] They're definitely delicious.

- Thanks.

- And why do you call this place Boulted Bread?

- Boulted is a milling term, and it's basically synonymous with sifting, and that sort of encompasses our ethos here.

We sort of think of our shop as, like, stripped down to the essentials.

So we don't do a ton of things, but the things that we do, we try to do really, really well.

The goal is to always bake the perfect loaf of bread, sort of with this idea that you'll never really reach that goal, but every day is an opportunity to try again, and there's something about that challenge on a daily basis that's really appealing to me personally.

- [Deborah] And so are there some favorites here?

- Yeah, I think my personal favorites probably are baguette.

I really love baguettes.

They're a really challenging loaf of bread to get right on a daily basis.

But I think the crowd favorite, and if I'm being honest, probably my favorite, too, is our morning bun, which is a croissant pastry that we sort of roll up with cinnamon sugar and lemon zest, and then we bake it in these muffin tins and coat it with a little bit more sugar, and it's just amazing, it's so good.

- [Deborah] So I understand you like to bake bread dark.

Is there a particular reason?

- Yeah, it's... All right, so that's a little controversial.

I think growing up in the south, growing up in Raleigh personally, I didn't encounter a lot of, like, dark bread growing up.

A lot of stuff that we historically baked down here is pretty light.

But once I had, like, a darker loaf of bread up in New England, I was sort of hooked on it.

By baking the bread pretty dark, it sort of allows the natural sugars in the flour and in the dough to fully caramelize.

Once that loaf cools, that caramelization gets sort of pulled back into the crumb or the inside of the loaf itself.

You end up getting a more flavorful loaf, not just on the crust, but on the inside as well.

You know, when the customer comes in, they not only see the pastries and the bread right in front of 'em on display, but you know, behind all the bread and pastry, you actually get to see the process unfold in front of you.

We have a big open bakery here, so if you're interested in that, like, you can just take a look, and you sort of get pulled into the activity of what's going on back of house.

We also have a big open mill room, so you can see the mill in action itself, and I don't know, it's sort of a unique experience.

It's pretty fun.

- [Deborah] And it looks like you have a variety of talents behind here helping you with the bread.

- Oh, yeah, you know, Sam and I started the shop, but you know, really, the only reason Boulted Bread exists and continues to thrive is we've been really fortunate and lucky to have historically just, like, really awesome folks come in here and bake bread and pastry with us.

I love these guys.

They're great, they're great, yeah.

- Joshua, thank you so much.

I'm excited for what you guys are doing- - Thank you.

- And your future, and I can't wait to take some pastries home myself.

- Well, thanks for coming, I really appreciate it.

- Boulted Bread is at 328 Dupont Circle in Raleigh, and they're open Wednesday through Sunday.

For more information, check out their website at boultedbread.com.