San Francisco › Places and landmarks
Sourdough bread
The sour, chewy bread of San Francisco, baked since the Gold Rush from a living dough.
Photo: Edward Z. Yang, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Sourdough bread rises without bought yeast. The baker keeps a piece of each day’s dough, the mother, and feeds it flour and water; the wild yeasts and bacteria living in it make the bread rise and give it its sour taste. In San Francisco the bread is tangier than elsewhere, and one of its bacteria was named after the city, Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.
The miners of the Gold Rush baked it in their camps, and old prospectors were called sourdoughs. The Boudin bakery has baked it since 1849, and says it still uses a mother kept alive since then.
Visitors eat it at Fisherman’s Wharf as a bread bowl, hollowed out and filled with clam chowder. Ride through San Francisco in 3D ›
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