I grew up near San Francisco, and I really love the local sourdough French bread you can get there. Think Boudin. I could eat an entire loaf at one sitting. Whenever I am in the Bay Area I buy a loaf or two at the airport and bring it home.
I have since moved to northwest Montana, and the sourdough bread you find here is doughy and tasteless. I don’t think the local bakers are unaware of how sourdough bread is suppose to look and taste, I just think they can’t bake it here.
I have read how starter changes depending on where you live due to local wild yeast, and I’ve also read that the water in San Francisco is unique, but is it really impossible to bake Boudin-style bread outside California?
Well there is no one way that sourdough is supposed to look and taste like. The word sourdough is a bit of a misnomer sometimes, it doesn’t have to be “sour”.
Cultures from different parts of the world have different taste and leavening properties. If you want the San Francisco taste, you generally want the San Francisco culture.
But there is nothing magical about the San Francisco culture, other than it contains wild yeast classified as Candida humilis and bacteria classified as Lactobacillus sanfrancisco.
As I type this, I am eating sourdough bread that I just made and baked with a culture from New Zealand. A lot of things will influence the taste of sourdough bread…hydration rate, how long the rise was (and if you employed a retardation period)…etc.
I suppose you could get a starter from San Francisco, and use that to get a closer taste. I started my own, and it had a fine taste. I’m in Indiana, nothing famous about our yeast. I would think a starter would start to change as it is exposed to the local wild yeast over time, but I have also heard of people failing to make a starter due to a lack of wild yeast in their environment (clean, sterile kitchen?). If you had such an environment, perhaps you could keep your imported San Fran yeast pure®. There are also various people around the country that will mail you some starter spores if you send them a self-addressed stamped envelope. I sent off for some a couple years back, but never used it. But such people exist. I think it was Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Starter that I got. I discarded my starter because I got tired of feeding it, and wasn’t going to bake sourdough often enough to justify the hassle. But I know I can always make or order another if the mood strikes me.
It is a combination of the local Lactobacillus sanfrancisco sp. and the baking method. I think most home bakers and many commercial bakeries lack both the ovens and the lactobacilli to reproduce the flavor and texture. If a bakery has the equipment and the lactobacilli, it may lack the desire to put in the time. It is an incredibly time consuming process.
That said, while I feel a devotion to Boudin (and Columbo and Parisian and others of my youth), many people are proud of their local sourdoughs. It is simply a matter of taste.
Heck, everything folks have said so far is correct. There may be science involved in baking but there’s art too.
the flour, the starter, the water, how long it rises, if you retard the dough for any length of time, those are all variables. If you want to try and get close to the SF bread, try to get your starter from there. But there’s still no guarantee it will come out like the bread you get in California.
I read somewhere that the Boudin Bakery in San Francisco has starter for it’s bread maintained in several locations, in case something should happen to the power and one place is ruined. San Francisco is on a major fault line you know. According to Wikipedia “The bakery still uses the same starter yeast-bacteria culture it developed during the California Gold Rush.”
There is no reason why you can’t bake a tasty sourdough yourself right where you are. I am a sourdough bread baker by hobby and I live in NJ now. It can be done. Starter may take on a bit of local flavor, but the “wild yeast” mostly comes from the flour you start with and feed to it rather than what is in the air.
This websiteis a nice introductory resource if you are interested in baking your own at home, thought there are hundreds of other resources out there too and recipes that I like better than what are on the site, Mike’s site is very good at demystifying the sourdough bread making process and makes for a good jumping off point.
My guess is that if you are having trouble finding San Francisco style sourdough in Montana it has more to do with local demand than local ability.
When preheating the oven increase the temp about 50 degrees higher than you want. Put an empty METAL (not glass, please not glass) pie plate on the lower rack. Put the dough in and then dump a cup or so of hot water into the preheated pie plate.
Keep a spray bottle of water near the stove. When the steam from the pieplate has started to dissipate open the oven and spray the walls of the oven with water. About a minute later do this again. Reset your oven temp to your actual desired baking temp and you’re good to go.
Additionally, it should be noted that this won’t do much with gas ovens because of the safety venting in place in those ovens, the steam just gets sucked right out too fast to do anything. With a gas oven your best bet is to wet the exterior of the bread itself with a water wash prior to placing it into the oven, to reapply about 3 minutes in and be sure you have a preheated stone in there. This won’t be quite the same thing as actually adding steam, but it’s really the best you can do.