San Francisco Sourdough:
Tradition & Innovation
Originally published in Bakery Global Magazine,
Issue 7, November 2019, page 70
Tartine Bakery has become the city’s landmark bread emporium, but don’t overlook San Francisco’s thriving sourdough tradition in our local craft bakeries.
The crowds at Boudin Bakery on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco attest to the strong tradition of sourdough bread in the Bay Area. Stroll through the bakery’s pictorial bread museum to learn how the sourdough mother, aka the natural yeast culture, is the starting point for all their breads. The Boudin family brought the original starter from France, opened the bakery in San Francisco in the mid-nineteenth century, and developed a local customer base. When gold nuggets were discovered in California’s Sacramento Valley in 1848, things changed. Thousands of prospective gold miners travelled from or through San Francisco, stocked their larders with both baked loaves and some of the liquid starter from Boudin’s, and headed to the Sierra foothills in search of fortune. A local baking tradition was about to receive its first taste of national attention.
Technically speaking, the bread is made with a high protein wheat flour which develops it characteristic chewy texture. Long kneading decreases the size of the air cells inside the bread, creating what bakers call a tight crumb. Once the dough is mixed, its utimate sourness comes not just from the mother, but from the length of time the dough ferments before it is shaped and baked. Like grapes into wine, dough fermentation creates sourness and an array of flavor notes in the final bread. The longer the fermentation—to a point—the more flavor. Too much fermentation and the original flavor of the flour, the grapes, or whatever you’re fermenting, becomes overpowered by acidity and offnotes.
Imagine the challenge of controlling the dough while the urgency of other tasks—like panning for gold nuggets—kept you occupied. It seems likely that the dough would sometimes over-ferment and bake up into a bread with a strong punch. In this way, the “sour dough” of San Francisco earned its name, gained a cult following, and solidified its status as a culinary icon.
Boudin’s original sourdough mother Takes many shapes & sizes in the fisherman’s wharf bake4ry.
A trip to Boudin is a good way to immerse yourself in the original flavor and style of sourdough bread. But there are several innovative craft bread bakers in the San Francisco Bay Area whose styles are found in the original tradition but whose methods are pushing boundaries. Their breads deliver a variety of flavor profiles with unique blends of flour, a milder level of sourness, and an attention to nutrition.
Josey Baker (Yes, that’s his real name!) started baking professionally in 2010 and opened Josey Baker Bread. His breads respect San Francisco’s sourdough tradition but he was “intrigued with using 100% whole grain from the start.” He’s careful to say he’s not a nutritionist when he adds, “There are healthy things in a whole grain and as a baker I want to keep them there.”
No better way to do that than to freshly mill whole grains and turn their flour into dough before flavor and nutrition are depleted through oxidation that occurs the longer a flour is stored. This method, called “milling diretcly into fermentation”, more effectively captures and retains the enzymes, wild yeast, and local flavor-giving bacteris found in the whole grain.
Three years later, with a New American Stone mill fabricated in Vermont, he oped The Mill, a cafe bakery at 736 Divisadero in NOPA, a western neighborhood of the city just North of the Panhandle. He now bakes between 400 and 500 loaves a week. “The mill runs all day, every day, now. And our whole grains come from California farmers, like the Fritz Durst Farm in Yolo county in the Sierra foothills.”
Josey’s breads show an influence from Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery with their bold bake, long fermentation, and higher hydration (read “larger interior air cells”). But grain is the star of Josey’s breads and the sourdough flavor is secondary. “I don’t want a bread so sour that it overpowers the flavor of the wheat variety,” he explains.
The bold bake of Josey’s breads at The Mill bring nuanced aromas and flavors to the compelling crusts.
The sourdough mother at The Mill is made with rye flour and it’s the starting point for all the breads. It’s fed twice daily—more frequent feedings develop a less sour flavor in a starter. To further reduce acidity, the mother is not used directly to make a main dough. Instead, a portion is removed and then goes through a series of builds, what bakers call levains, before being added to a main dough. Each of these steps along the way includes another feeding with its own fermentation schedule.
This stepping process brings layered flavors to the final bread. Josey explains the benefit of the process like this, “The series of feedings and shorter fermentations between the main starter and the final dough create a mild acidity and a highly active yeast culture. More importantly, the system gives us checkpoints where we can monitor flavor development and yeast activity during production so we can make adjustments as we go. It’s an inherent way to control consistency in our breads.”
The baker’s art is to build distinctive flavors in his breads. Because different flours can be blended into the sourdough culture as it travels through the building process, the flavor profile of the levain can be adjusted to fit its ultimate destination. “We use whole wheat flour to build our levain for the Country Bread and for our Pizza Dough. We build rye into it to make the Red, White & Rye, a country-style loaf made from whole wheat and whole rye flours.”
Your palate can discover this nuanced approach in his classic Seed Feast bread. Outside there’s a dark crust with roasted and toasty notes—malt, roasted onion, bitter chocolate. Inside, there’s a slight bitterness reminiscent of an IPA, and it’s just acidic enough to highlight the nutty, natural sweetness of the flax and the toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds.
Using locally sourced grains freshly milled on site, Josey Baker embodies the hip relevance of whole grain bread baking.
The Mill is a collaboration with Four Barrel Coffee and the bakery occupies the back of the house. In the front, customers can enjoy their coffee and espresso drinks while watching bread make their way into and out of the oven while tomorrow’s breads are shaped. The bakery staff, which often includes a local high school student as part of a job training intiiative, is dilkigent, attentive, and fun-loving.
The vibe doesn’t just stay inside the bakery, it reaches out into the community, too. In addition to supporting local California farmers, the bakery opens its retail space to discussion groups and fund-raising dinners. There’s holistic energy at work her and it’s aptly summed up in Josey’s motto, Make Good Bread, Do Good Work.
A few neighborhoods over you’ll find Jane the Bakery at 1881 Geary Street, in the Lower Fillmore. Inside and likely with flour on his hands, you’ll find Jorgen Carlsen directing the day- to-day bakery operations.
When asked what makes good bread, Jorgen described the sensory characteristics of his vision of great sourdough bread. “I strive for moist breads with a soft mouthfeel that are not too chewy. But most important, the texture and sourness must match the product.”
Jane the Bakery’s Classic Sourdough, with its tender chew and open crumb, is a modern interpretation of the iconic San Francisco bread.
Larger breads, like his Sourdough and his country-style Whole Grain from 100% California Wheat loaves have larger air cells. Bigger breads have more surface area, so they can hold their shape with a higher hydration. Slightly smaller breads have a lower hydration but their moisture is enhanced by moist inclusions such as the black mission figs and currants in this author’s favorite Fig Walnut.
Whole grains and whole grain flours appear in Jorgen’s breads but they aren’t always the major players. “How much of the whole grain do I want to taste in the final bread?” he asks himself when formulating a new bread. “There’s also the texture contribution of a whole ground grain to consider.” He’s referring to the need to properly hydrate and ferment whole grain flours so they don’t deliver a coarse mouthfeel. Jorgen’s breads incorporate a flavorful percent of whole ground grains yet they still feel creamy when you’re chewing them.
“I strive for maximum fermentation, to get as much flavor as possible from the grain,” he adds. Try the durum wheat pan bread to see just what he means. Durum wheat, for example, has one of the grain world’s highest protein contents and its flour is typically added to doughs to bring more structure and chewiness. (Author’s tip: To achieve a chewier texture in your bagel dough, for example, a small percent of durum semolina can be substituted for an equal weight of the white flour in the formula.)
Jorgen focuses more on durum’s flavor than on its strength. Creating what’s called a scald, he blends whole grain durum flour with water (about 1:2 ratio) and heats it to 155 degrees F. This brings out the naturally sweet taste of the durum, balancing the bread’s sourness. Structurally, the scalding process gels the starches in the durum flour, bringing body to the bread without more chewiness. The bread bakes in a sandwich loaf pan, with its top cresting at least an inch above the pan’s top edge. The long bake favors a very dark crust with notes of molasses, dark beer, and that sweetly burnt caramel flavor you’d find on top of a crème brûlée.
Amanda Michael opened the original Jane Cafe on Fillmore Street in San Francisco in 2011, offering breakfast, lunch, and pastries. With a career as a pastry chef who started incorporating breads when she was working with a hotel group in Lake Tahoe, Amanda exemplifies the technical breadth required of baking & pastry chefs in the early 90’s. She remembers, “Back then if you were a pastry chef, you also had to know how to bake good breads. There wasn’t the distinction that we find today.”
In the past two decades, there has been an advancement of the baker’s skill set—our knowledge of grains, the nuances of fermentation, the focus on flavor and texture attributes—these have all evolved. “It was a different time. When I bake something at home from that former style in my career, the staff loves eating it but tease me, calling it ‘80’s bread’.”
Amanda Michael of Jane the bakery can proudly embrace what are without doubt some of the very best baguettes in this bread- centric city.