"Even as San Francisco evolves, the scent of Boudin's signature loaves fills the air. 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."
Isidore Boudin founded Boudin Bakery during the Gold Rush and sustained its signature sourdough for nearly two centuries. The starter's origins are unclear, with rumors linking it to a '49er prospector or to Isidore's arrival from France; the starter includes a local airborne yeast known as lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. In 1852 a large French immigrant population provided a ready market, and horse-drawn bread wagons delivered loaves to hilly neighborhoods. Boudin resisted adopting Fleischmann's commercial yeast in the 1860s, maintaining traditional sourdough methods and a reputation for distinctive scored, rounded loaves.
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]