This article is part of SF Throwbacks, a feature series that tells historic stories of San Francisco to teach us all more about our city’s past. It’s also an excerpt from Alec Scott’s book, Oldest San Francisco — with some edits and additions from The Bold Italic.
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.
In the 1860s, a reliable commercial yeast pioneered by Fleischmann’s became all the rage among bakeries. But Boudin declined to use it — the first display of the stubbornness that would become (sorry) baked into the company’s DNA.
In 1873, the by-then prosperous Isidore married another French ex-pat, Louise Erni, who has a central role in the Boudin story. She kept her head in the 1906 quake, rescuing the sourdough starter in a bucket as she fled the bakery’s soon to be destroyed premises.
In 1935, Boudin’s descendants had the good sense to hire an Italian named Stefano Giraudo — perhaps comforting themselves at the time with the knowledge that he’d trained in a French bakery in Toulon. He knew their ways. For 60 years, Papa Steve (as he became known in-house) was Boudin’s early-to-rise master baker. He purchased Boudin in 1941 — by then, its pronunciation had been thoroughly Americanized to ‘boo-deen’. His grandson Daniel Giraudo is part of the current ownership team.
In the 1960s, many older bakeries began to adopt a new generation of fast-acting, low-cost yeasts, but again Boudin declined. “We’ve stuck to our process,” Daniel said, of their labor-intensive, three-day method. “We’ve never tried to be someone that we’re not.”
In 1993, the family sold the company to a midwestern bakery-chain owner, Specialty Foods, which took some steps to homogenize Boudin’s offerings — even while it held onto the mother-dough starter and kept on Fernando Padilla, Papa Steve’s successor as master baker.
In part because of his close relationship with his grandfather, Daniel and business partner Sharon Duvall bought Boudin in 2002. This meant that Papa Steve got to see his legacy back in family hands before dying in 2012 — at the French Hospital, another institution built by early emigrants from France. Daniel has put Papa Steve’s photo in all of Boudin’s now nearly 30 branches.
Sourdough went out of fashion for a while. But it’s roared back recently, with many other Bay Area bakeries, the likes of Acme and Semifreddi’s, churning out tangy loaves that are fermented with the help of airborne yeast. “Our competitors have come around to our methods, I don’t see that as a negative,” Dan said, before going into sales mode:
“There’s a renewed appreciation of the romance around the sourdough, the fermentation. Also, fermented products are better for you.”
The store’s flagship bakery has an industrial fridge with a sign saying, “The Mother Dough lives here” — a tribute to Boudin’s stubborn allegiance, over nearly 175 years, to the starter that helped it get going.
Alec Scott is an award-winning journalist, with features in The New York Times, Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Los Angeles Times and Sunset.
Learn more about Oldest San Francisco, his latest book with stories of the institutions that helped make San Francisco the place it is today.
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