User:Avirr/Artisan Bread

The revival of artisan bread and the San Francisco Bay Area's "Bread Revolution", which in turn created the modern "artisan bread" movement in America, and remains a "benchmark" for commercial handmade bread.

Bread in San Francisco

There have been independent retail bakeries in San Francisco continuously since the California Gold Rush of 1849, and many restaurants make their own bread. However, in the wholesale market (which distributes bread regionally to restaurants and grocery stores) was marked by a slow decline from the early heyday, and the subsequent emergence of a new generation of artisan bakers.

Gold rush era

San Francisco is a favorable location for baking high quality bread, particularly sourdough, due to humidity and temperate climate. Sourdough, invented in ancient Egypt and common in parts of Europe, became the primary bread of San Francisco during the California Gold Rush. Gold miners valued it for their camps because of its durability, and the relative ease of obtaining yeast. Although many different kinds of starter are suitable for making sourdough, specific local native species of wild bacteria (Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis) and of yeast (Candida milleri) have been recently isolated as the dominant cultures in the most prized local breads. By 1854 there were 63 bakeries in San Francisco. "Starter" yeasts were either carefully kept and maintained by each bakery as a "mother starter", or simply allowed to generate from the ambient air.

Boudin Bakery was founded in 1849 by Isadore Boudin, son of a family of master bakers from Burgundy, France, came for the gold trade but instead opened a bakery, where he invented the San Francisco style of sourdough by applying French baking methods to the fermented dough breads the California miners were eating. Parisian Bakers, for many years the most popular bread in San Francisco, started in 1856. In Oakland, Toscana started in 1895 and Colombo started in 1896. Parisian supplied San Francisco's oldest restaurant, Tadich Grill, for 141 years until the bakery was shut down. The three surviving bakeries continue to use each of their respective mother starters, developed in the 19th century.

Postwar decline

A generation of decline and consolidation, starting after World War II, led to poor quality bread in San Francisco. The mid-20th century began a "Dark Ages" for bread, as most Americans began to eat prepackaged, sliced loaves. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, there was less fresh bread available across America, leading writer Henry Miller to exclaim, "You can travel 50,000 miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread." Much of the decline paralleled the nationwide trends, both for bread and other foods, of consolidation, lower priced and frozen ingredients, reducing labor costs, and adding preservatives for longer shelf life. Mechanization requires drier dough than hand-formed loaves, leading to drier loaves that do not have the same large air bubbles and chewy consistency of good sourdough. Despite quality issues, sourdough remained popular. Today it accounts for 70% of all bread sales among the top three independent bakeries.

Some small producers from the Gold Rush era kept the sourdough tradition and continued to produce bread. Steven Giraudo, an artisan baker who immigrated from Italy in 1935, took his first job in America at Boudin, then bought the bakery out of bankruptcy in 1941. He later sold it to a larger company, but after a series of ownership changes the bakery was bought back by two of Giraudo's sons through their investment bank. The Giraudo family bought Parisian, transferring it to the San Francisco French Bread Company of Oakland, California in 1984. That company was in turn acquired by Interstate Brands Corporation of Kansas City, Missouri in 1993, which went bankrupt and shut down Parisian in 2005.

Despite their history, the old bakeries that survived are not small, and are not "artisan" operations in the common sense. The top three bakeries employ 1,000 people and make sixty million "units" of bread per year (mostly loaves) that they sell in more than 4,000 Northern California outlets, as well as airports and supermarkets throughout the United States. Boudin operates 32 retail outlets, mostly as coffee shops, including notable branches at Disneyland and Fisherman's Wharf. San Francisco Sourdough Bread Company bought both Colombo and Toscana, and replaced the hearth ovens used for handmade sourdough with high capacity ovens. Before its demise, Interstate was making 217,460 loaves of bread and 71,540 rolls a week from the Parisian factory in San Francisco, as well as Wonder Bread, Twinkies, and Ho Hos snacks from a sister factory nearby.

Acme bread loaves on display at Ferry Building retail shop in San Francisco

Artisan bread movement

The Bay Area's artisan bread movement represents a return to small production of handmade loaves. The artisan bread movement was in some ways a return to older techniques styles, but in some ways a shift. Unlike the Gold Rush bakers, they were based on French and Italian techniques, and very crusty. Among the hallmarks of the new artisan breads, loaves are exposed to steam while baking (a technique developed in Vienna, Austria), creating a shiny surface that may be crusty or chewy, while keeping the interior moist. "Rustic" breads use whole grain flours, including rye flour and whole wheat. Breads are "scored" with decorative cross-cuts, along which the bread cracks while rising and baking to allow steam to escape. Scores are made in distinctive styles that identify each bakery.

The first of the many new companies arose out of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Carmel Valley, California, a group of monks derived from the San Francisco Zen Center (which owns Greens Restaurant) that began baking bread in 1963 and operated a bakery in San Francisco's Cole Valley from 1976 to 1992. A pastry shop, Just Desserts, operated the bakery from then until 1999.

The Cheese Board Collective opened in 1967 in what would later be known as Berkeley's "Gourmet Ghetto", and became a worker-owned cooperative in 1971.

In 1970 Narsai David, now food and wine editor of KCBS and a nationally-syndicated food writer, opened a highly successful catering business and restaurant, Narsai's, in Kensington, California. Narsai's became renowned for its breadmaking. David explained his philosophy: "Using nothing more than flour, water, salt and yeast, you could bake a loaf of bread in as little as three hours—or you could take 24 hours. The one that takes 24 hours has developed a much more sophisticated flavor. Take two to three hours and the bread tastes like flour and water."