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."

Boudin Bakery was founded during the Gold Rush by French immigrant Isidore Boudin and specialized in distinctive sourdough bread maintained for nearly two centuries. The sourdough starter's origins are variously attributed to a '49er prospector or brought from France, and the culture includes lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. By 1852 a large French immigrant population provided demand, and horse-drawn bread wagons delivered scored rounded loaves to nails customers left by their doors. The bakery declined Fleischmann's commercial yeast in the 1860s, preserving traditional fermentation. In 1873 Isidore married Louise Erni, who saved the starter during the 1906 earthquake.

Read at The Bold Italic