Cupcake Quest Sparks Grocery Journey

New to the Wooster Square neighborhood, I decided to make a batch of cupcakes to bribe my roommates into friendship. I started the hunt for the right grocery store — which proved more complicated than I thought.

I moved into the neighborhood in September. I didn’t bring a car. The main vehicles at my disposal were my bicycle and my own two feet, though a roommate with a car helped me in a pinch. Moving back to live in New Haven on a moderate salary, I worried about reasonable, convenient food options.

And so, my first stop to fill my cabinets was the closest option: Ferraro’s, a five-minute walk from my house. Yelp’s four-star, single-dollar-sign rating of the store factored in the grocery store’s large meat selection, reasonable prices and allegedly unsafe location across from Farnam Courts.

Once there, I found one lonely bag of all-purpose flour slumped on the shelf, leaking white powder from a hole in its middle.

“That’s all we have right now,” the stock clerk told me, with a shrug in his voice.

I had surveyed four grocery stores within biking distance of my house: Ferraro’s, C‑Town on Grand Avenue, Elm City Market on State Street, and Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue. Google Maps told me me it would take almost an hour to walk and almost 20 minutes to bike between the two farthest from each other, Stop & Shop and C‑Town.

I love to bake; I’m addicted to the steady flow of endorphins that comes from perfectly completing all the steps of a trustworthy recipe, while knowing I will have a delicious reward at the end. I think of myself as a limited but prolific baker: I pop out a lot of batches of the same two or three desserts.

A couple of years ago, I found a recipe online for mocha cupcakes that soon became the jewel in my culinary crown. They are moist and rich and perfect. I add handfuls of dark-chocolate chips to the batter, whip up my own frosting, and feed the tiny cakes to new friends to blind them to my personal flaws, at least for a little while.

Through my quest for these cupcake ingredients, I got an education in how to shop car-less in the center of the city.

I checked each store for the main ingredients, keeping brands constant when possible, to examine price trends. When I could not find equivalent brands, I compared the cheapest options available at each store. For example, each store stocked a different brand of milk, a key part of the recipe.

I also looked at a few other items my roommates and I regularly purchase to fill our fridge, including meat, produce and bread.

I placed an asterisk next to the price in the table when the store did not have any of that item in stock at the time I sought it. I made at least two trips to each store.

The experiment was unscientific — I spent hours crouching in front of faded food labels and creepily snapping photos of butter. But ultimately, my chart shows it’s possible to find similarly priced items at each of the four grocery stores. The total prices of cupcake ingredients differed at most between any two stores by $8.49 — with Elm City Market as the most expensive and Ferraro’s as the least expensive.

“That’s almost ten bucks — that’s a burrito!” my roommate said when I showed him my results.

Luckily, I live within several minutes walking and biking distance of both stores, so the choice between the two is easy.

The difference comes when comparing the selection and variety in each.

Regional chains Stop & Shop and C‑Town have more variety and selection in less expensive in-store brand items. Ferraro’s is one of the last family-operated grocery stores in the area. Elm City Market began as a member-owned cooperative and is currently in the middle of transitioning away from that structure into a worker-owned store after a financial collapse.

I had made assumptions about each of the stores before comparing the actual prices. I expected Elm City Market to be much more expensive, because of its focus on local and organic foods, and for Ferraro’s and C‑Town to be less expensive because of their locations in lower-income areas. Yelp gives Elm City Market a $$$ rating based on 53 reviews, Ferraro’s a $ rating based on 38 reviews, Stop & Shop a $$ rating based on eight reviews. C‑Town did not get enough reviews to be rated.

In reality, Elm City Market’s prices do trend higher, but the store has options available that are comparable to the others. (I also hit the store at transitional time, so it wasn’t all well-stocked as it has been and presumably will be.) Ferraro’s, rated the least expensive, has more ​“bargain” options but also some items priced within a dollar of the other stores. (The results can be found in the charts higher up in this story.)

I found a strange gap at C‑Town: It does not stock Hershey’s cocoa powder. I would have to substitute hot cocoa mix or ground chocolate chips in the cupcake recipe.

Elm City Market and Ferraro’s have less selection in processed foods and other non-produce or dairy items, and were often out of stock of these items when I visited in late afternoon. On one trip, I asked the stock clerk at Elm City Market for a package of rice heavier than a pound, which the other stores carried in multiple brands, and was told it might be in one of the recently delivered packages. He did not offer to sniff one out for me.

In mid-September, my roommate and I went to search for pine nuts in the store’s extensive grain, seed and nut section, where shoppers can fill small bags and pay by weight. But the bin was empty. We were advised to come back at the beginning of October.

We decided to order online instead.

The final product of the original shopping trip: 12 rich mocha cupcakes with a buttery cream cheese frosting, shared with my two roommates and the downstairs neighbors. I personally devoured at least a fourth of the batch. Well worth the journey.