Only This Month, Get $40 Off a Box of Home-Baked Artisan Bread

The croissants from bread delivery service Wildgrain should not have been this delicious. After all, they’d arrived in the mail. But they were nonetheless flaky, buttery, classic-tasting Viennoiserie with a browned exterior and airy structure within, still hot from the oven and delicate enough to crinkle under the barest touch.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Had they been delivered on my plate at a local restaurant, I would have accepted these croissants as fresh-baked from scratch. And yet, just 20 minutes earlier, these pastries were frozen solid. Two hours before, they’d been on a delivery truck bound to my house.

Wildgrain is both a new and old concept: fresh bread delivery. It’s a monthly subscription service, delivering a box of slow-fermented sourdough bread and pastries from any of 50 small bakeries across the country. The goods are par-baked, flash-frozen, shipped directly to your stoop, and ready to finish baking at home. In their way, they’re fresher than you’d even get from a local bakery. Gluten-free and plant-based plans are also available.

The plans aren’t cheap at regular price: $99 a month for a six-item box and $159 a month for a 12-item box. But right now those delivery boxes are on sale for the only time this year, according to Wildgrain’s reps. Enter the promo code WIRED40, and Wildgrain will give you $40 off your first month’s delivery box (for six-item and 12-item boxes only). Also included are free croissants or free gluten-free cookies for life alongside your Wildgrain box—as long as you order before November 23.

How Wildgrain Subscriptions Work

A Wildgrain subscription arrives as a monthly box, filled with four, six, or 12 items that might range from a full sourdough loaf or fresh-made pasta to a pack of six doughnuts or four large croissants. Basically, you can build your own box each month, choosing among healthy sourdough or pasta and decadent pastries.

The frozen baked goods can be placed in your freezer to be ready whenever you need them—when the fam stops by for a Sunday evening visit, say. Baking times range from five minutes (doughnuts) to 20 minutes (croissants, pumpkin biscuits.) The baked goods don’t need to be thawed before baking: You pop them in frozen.

The reason this process works is that the bread is mostly baked already. Wildgrain contracts with small bakeries, according to company representatives, though their identity is not disclosed.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The bakeries par-bakes the bread or pastries before freezing them, so that all you have to do is bake for relatively little time in order to fluff up and brown the bread, biscuit, doughnut, or scone.

Par-baking, then finishing up bread, is hardly a new idea, of course—it’s probably how that piping-warm bread basket at your local neighborhood restaurant already happens. It’s also an essential component to any recipe for Sicilian or Detroit-style pizza.

You find a few other bakeries here and there offering par-baked, frozen bread—and supermarkets also offer mostly lower-quality take-and-bake breads in their freezer sections. Wildgrain, founded in 2020, is the first nationwide service I’ve seen that sends no-preservative, artisan-style baked loaves all over the country. Though the service does require a subscription, you can cancel (or pause) your subscription anytime up to four days before the next scheduled delivery.

For more tasty things delivered to your porch or mailbox, see WIRED’s guide to the best meal delivery services, the best meat subscription boxes, the best coffee subscriptions, and the best subscription boxes for gifts.

My Experience With Wildgrain

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I tried a box of Wildgrain in October that included full loaves of sourdough and mixed-grain bread loaves, pumpkin-cinnamon biscuits, a half-dozen apple cider doughnuts, a box of four croissants, and a 12-ounce bag of fresh (then frozen) rigatoni.

The results, as hinted above, were far better than expected. The danger of par-baked loaves is known to anyone who’s ever eaten at a national sandwich chain: Handled poorly, you end up with under-risen, kinda dense, maybe slightly wet or rubbery or underbaked-tasting dough.

But the sourdough loaf from Wildgrain was surprisingly excellent, crispy on the outside with genuine crumb structure. Though my hometown of Portland is home to myriad truly excellent bakeries—bakeries whose bread, when fresh, is better than anything Wildgrain could deliver in the mail—the benefit of the Wildgrain loaf was that it was ready for me anytime in the freezer, baked up fresh on the spot.

As far as the pastries, I was sort of a sucker for them. The pumpkin biscuits came on more like a British scone—crumbly and browned, a bit sweet and lightly holiday spiced. The doughnuts were raised, but not oily, baked and crisped and airy. The croissants I’ve already sung the praises of.

Only a mixed-grain loaf didn’t quite deliver: This was a bit dense, with less character than the sourdough. The resting period, 10 minutes for a loaf, is also very important to ensuring that the middle of a thicker loaf actually bakes fully.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

And as for the pasta: It did offer toothsome chew on a rigatoni alla zozonna I prepped at home. But pasta doesn’t benefit quite as much from being delivered frozen. At least in my neighborhood, I can easily find fresh pasta at my local market for a lower price, and it’ll keep in the fridge.

The trade-off to all Wildgrain’s convenience, is, of course, cost. A six-item box, at $99, amounts to about $16 per loaf of bread or box of pastries. Not everyone lives in a city with artisan bakeries in every neighborhood, of course. But I do—and my local bakery might charge $10 or $12 for a fresh loaf of slow-fermented, sourdough, artisan bread.

The added cost on Wildgrain is for the convenience of having the bread delivered, frozen, waiting patiently at my home for the day when I might need it—and for the fact that my home-baked bread will still be fresher than a bakery loaf baked early the same morning. The beauteous feeling of a crackling-crisp, still-warm loaf of bread from the oven is sorta unparalleled.

If you’re not a baker and don’t feel like proofing your own dough for days, this is maybe the closest you can get at home to a fresh-baked sourdough. An introductory box is $40 off until November 23, for six-item or 12-item boxes, which actually makes Wildgrain cheaper than your local bakery—and lets you try out whether you want a box at regular price moving forward.

Anyway, here are links to the limited-time $40 introductory discount—which goes until November 23 for WIRED readers so long as you enter the WIRED40 promo code.