Bay Area Has Never Soured on Sourdough : Food: Although the symbol of San Francisco has failed to take off elsewhere, the local market is booming, thanks largely to a revival of “village bakeries.”

On the streets of San Francisco--and in Berkeley and Emeryville as well--neighborhood bakeries are springing up to feed the local passion for sourdough bread.

Bigger and more established bakers have grander ambitions: To broaden the existing market with new products and to eventually turn what has been a regional mania into national taste.

“Sourdough is caught up with the whole mystique of San Francisco--the fog, the cable cars and sourdough bread,” said Art Silverman, deputy press secretary to Mayor Art Agnos. “Better that than Rice-A-Roni.”

Sourdough bread might be as inextricably linked with San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge, but no one knows exactly how it came to California. Some trace the origins to an obscure conflict in Mexico known as the Pastry War of 1838.

The skirmish grew out of a claim by a French pastry chef whose shop had been destroyed and its wares devoured by rampaging Mexican soldiers. After a French fleet blockaded the port of Veracruz, the Mexican government finally agreed to pay up, and the baker moved to San Francisco, where his sourdough took on a distinctive flavor that some attributed to the fog and sea air.

Gold Rush diaries show that ‘49ers took their dough on the road. Gold-panning tins doubled as bread pans, and, on cold nights, the miners curled up with the pots holding the starter dough. Occasionally, prospectors used the gloppy mixture to patch holes in cabins, treat wounds and shine belt buckles. They weren’t called sourdoughs for nothing.

Ever since, Bay Area residents--and millions of visitors--have hankered like few others on Earth for the tangy stuff.

All the lip-smacking by travelers aside, sourdough bread may be a hard sell in the rest of the country. True San Francisco sourdough flavor is tough to reproduce elsewhere, and many consumers in other regions seem content to trade off taste for the convenience of mass-produced, sliced brands that keep for several days.

Moreover, sourdough bread baking is an art best practiced on a modest scale, putting the big “white bread” companies uncharacteristically at a disadvantage (although they’ve recently begun taking a big slice of the market with “light” sourdough lines touting reduced calories).

But the sourdough tradition is alive and booming in the Bay Area, thanks in large part to a revival of “village bakeries.” Like Napa Valley wines, the hand-crafted breads from boutique operations such as Acme, Semifreddi’s, Gayle’s, Bakers of Paris, Metropolis and Tassajara (named for the Zen Buddhist monastery near Big Sur) have begun garnering international reputations out of proportion with their regional followings.

At fine Bay Area eateries, the sourdough batards and pains au levain often get more attention from food junkies than the free-range chicken and the Sonoma baby lamb. Some restaurants sell loaves of their bakery-bought sourdough to savvy customers who know to ask the bartender.

Dock workers, lawyers and secretaries debate the merits of this or that baguette. And it’s the rare corner grocery or upscale supermarket that doesn’t offer a basketful of flour-dusted hearth breads, poking up like so many spikes of wheat in their crisp, white bags and costing two to four times as much as mass-made loaves.

Information Resources Inc., a Chicago-based research firm that analyzes grocery store data, says Bay Area residents eat three times more French and Italian bread, including sourdough, than the national norm. And that doesn’t take into account purchases at microbakeries by walk-ins.

Such breads made up about 23% of the Bay Area’s $130 million in retail bread sales for the year ended Nov. 3, 1990, according to A. C. Nielsen Co.’s Scantrack research service. By contrast, these products nationally accounted for only 10.5% of the nation’s $6 billion in bread sales.

The microbakeries might not be able to trace their starters to the Gold Rush, but they are firm believers in hands-on baking, even if their equipment is far more sophisticated than what the first sourdough bakers used in the Middle East in 7000 B.C.

In 1983, Steve Sullivan was making bread for Alice Waters at her renowned Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley when the demand for special breads prompted him and his wife, Susie, to open a small bakery.

“I baked it all, and my wife delivered it,” said Sullivan, who wears his long salt-and-pepper hair in a ponytail. On many days, his Acme Bread Co. in Berkeley would run out of bread by noon.

Even so, Sullivan resisted expansion for seven years, fearing a compromise on quality. With a second plant, opened in 1989, the company now churns out as many as 7,500 loaves a day--all molded at least partly by hand--for 120 groceries and restaurants, including Chez Panisse. One small Sacramento grocery chain sends a driver to Berkeley to pick up loaves seven days a week.

Maintaining the precious sourdough starters or “mother doughs”--pungent mixtures of flour and water that bubble and grow in large plastic buckets as they react with wild yeasts in the environment--is a full-time job. On holidays, Sullivan totes starter around in the back of a station wagon, using flour and water to keep the mixture alive.

Almost unknown in San Francisco 16 months ago, Semifreddi’s, with $1 million in annual sales, operated for five years in a 450-square-foot space in Kensington in the East Bay, making 5,400 loaves a week for a few customers close by. In June, 1989, it opened a 5,000-square-foot plant and cafe in an industrial part of Emeryville. Production has grown to 25,000 loaves a week for 90 customers in San Francisco and elsewhere.

Unlike bread from big bakeries, which contains commercial yeasts and is turned out in as little as two hours, Semifreddi’s bread takes 10 hours for mixing the starter with the dough, initial shaping, resting, final molding and fermenting before baking. (The longer the dough ferments, or proofs, the sourer it gets. The process is unpredictable, subject to changes because of weather and temperature.)

“Sourdough is like wine,” said Tom Frainier, a former Clorox Co. accountant who co-founded Semifreddi’s with his sister, Barbara Frainier Rose, the head baker, and brother-in-law, Michael Rose. “If you try to make it in a microwave, it doesn’t taste very good.”

Although the newcomers have made inroads, four venerable brands with colorful histories and fans among natives and tourists alike--Boudin, Toscana, Colombo and Parisian--still maintain a lock on the market, producing 2.5 million loaves a week. Not incidentally, the four lines are all owned by one company whose Oakland headquarters location didn’t discourage it from using the name San Francisco French Bread Co.

Isidore Boudin (pronounced Bo-deen), the wronged baker of the Pastry War in Mexico, opened San Francisco’s first French bakery in 1849. Other immigrant-owned bakeries followed: San Francisco’s Parisian Bakery, in 1856, and Toscana and Colombo in the East Bay.

After Boudin’s death, the family sold the bakery in 1945 to Steve Giraudo, an Italian immigrant who can recall delivering door to door in the early days, hanging the loaves on a nail near each front door. At 77, Giraudo still immerses himself in the bread making, arriving at Boudin’s 10th Avenue bakery by 5 a.m. But the business today is owned and run by his sons, Steve and Louis, and Sharon Duvall, formerly with the Coopers & Lybrand accounting firm.

In 1984, the Giraudos bought Toscana, Colombo and Parisian, which had earlier been forced by high costs and competition to merge. San Francisco French Bread, however, preserves the identity and recipes of each because of strong brand loyalty.

San Francisco French Bread, with yearly sales of $120 million, is slowly extending the reach of Boudin with a 75,000-customer mailing list and combined shops and bakeries in Chicago and San Diego.

Duvall, Boudin’s president, said the company hopes to develop new markets and become a national brand “within 10 years.” If the Bay Area flavors are to be preserved, she pointed out, that will mean frequent dispatches of starter to faraway markets. Once in another city, the mother dough mutates and the flavor changes within a few weeks. (A few years back, with much fanfare, the Giraudos insured some Boudin sourdough starter for $1 million and flew it first-class to San Diego for the opening of a bakery.)

Despite the Bay Area’s reputation as a culinary trend-setter, Boudin might find it tough to win over customers in the South and Midwest whose tastes are tamer. “Someone in Savannah, Ga., or Tulsa, Okla., may say this isn’t what I want to eat,” said Bernard Pacyniak, managing editor of Bakery Production and Marketing, a trade publication in Chicago.

With its Bay Area market maturing, Parisian, the brand sold in white, red and blue bags in airports, also just opened a 30,000-square-foot bakery in San Diego, envisioned as a launch pad for expansion into Los Angeles and Orange County.

Lou Giraudo, a labor lawyer who serves as president of the San Francisco Police Commission, said Parisian breads in San Diego have already wrested away 35% of their category, primarily from Oroweat, a General Foods line. A General Foods spokeswoman said the company would not comment on sourdough.

To the chagrin of some sourdough purists, but apparently to the delight of calorie-conscious consumers, mass marketers such as Continental Baking Co., a Ralston Purina unit that makes Wonder Bread, and Campbell Taggart, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch Cos. that produces Earth Grains, have begun capitalizing on the sourdough craze with reduced-calorie lines to which the sour flavor has been added.

Introduced last year in the West, Wonder Light Sourdough quickly captured about 5% of the Bay Area market. Earth Grains will bring out its light line in the Bay Area early next year.

To counter the attack, San Francisco French Bread plans in January to begin a campaign noting that sourdough bread is naturally low in calories and cholesterol-free. Janet Greenlee, a spokeswoman, said the so-called light sourdoughs have twice as much fat as any San Francisco French Bread loaves with shortening. The company intends soon to eliminate even that limited amount to be able to claim that its breads are free of fat.

Meanwhile, aficionados continue to debate just what constitutes authentic San Francisco sourdough bread. Some maintain that the flavor can’t be reproduced anywhere else, but, in 1969, Leo Kline, a microbiologist, analyzed the starters of several local bakeries and discovered a bacterium that he named lactobacillus sanfrancisco . He then patented products that he contended could be used anywhere to produce San Francisco-style sourdough from scratch.

Kline, who in 1986 sold the patents to the Giraudos, maintains that they defaulted on an agreement to market his products; they deny it.

But Kline’s thinking gets some support from Ed Wood, a self-styled sourdough expert in Cascade, Ida., who sells starters from all over the world by mail.

“I know all sorts of people in Denver who pay $5 a loaf to have it UPS-ed from San Francisco,” said Wood, author of “World Sourdoughs From Antiquity.” “We started our cultures in Puget Sound and moved to Idaho, where they are as fine and consistent.

“It’s hype,” he said of the persistent notion that San Francisco has the monopoly on special sourdough. “It’s called marketing, I think.”