How Boudin Bakery baked its way through history

"The subtitle of the Boudin Bakery's story should be The Virtue of Stubbornness: Founded in the thick of the Gold Rush by one of the sudden city's many French immigrants - Isidore Boudin - the bakery carried on doing its one main thing, its distinctive sourdough bread, through the better part of two centuries. There are some overlapping tales about the bread's starter. It is rumored to have been passed to Boudin by a gold prospector, a '49er, but also to have come with Isidore from France. It is certainly enriched with an airborne yeast that seems characteristic of this city - so much so that it has been saddled with the mouthful Latin handle of lactobacillus sanfranciscensis."

"Boudin had a ready-made market here, since, as of 1852, nearly one in six of the 36,000 San Franciscans came from France - many of them escaping turmoil and widespread unemployment in the mother country. Soon enough, the horse-drawn Boudin bread-wagon became a familiar sight on the hilly streets, its delivery-men pushing the distinctively scored, rounded loaves onto nails customers left protruding next to their doors."

Boudin Bakery began during the Gold Rush when Isidore Boudin focused on a distinctive sourdough loaf. The starter's origin is variously attributed to a '49er prospector or to France, and it is nurtured by a local airborne yeast known as lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. By 1852 a large French population provided immediate customers, and horse-drawn wagons delivered scored, rounded loaves to nails outside homes. In the 1860s the bakery declined Fleischmann's commercial yeast and continued traditional methods. Longstanding adherence to the original starter and techniques sustained the bakery's sourdough identity for generations.

Read at Medium