A baker’s bread &butter
Boudin master talks about the shop’s storied history and what makes its sourdough special
When it comes to the flavor of a city, you could say that San Francisco tastes like a bite of crusty, chewy Boudin sourdough bread. That’s because the bakery’s wild yeast starter, which bakers have fed with flour and water daily since Isidore Boudin founded the company in 1849, includes the city’s foggy, salt-kissed air.
Keeping that mother dough alive is the most important thing to master baker Fernando Padilla, who has been with the company for 40 years. In 1979, a then-17-year-old Padilla began training under “Papa” Steve Giraudo, who was master baker and owner at the time. Since then, other than the original sourdough round, long and baguette, every loaf of Boudin bread has been created by Padilla, from the chocolate raisin sourdough to the seasonal critter shapes, like Dungeness crabs and Easter bunnies.
Today, from the flagship bakery at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, Padilla leads a team of 48 bakers who make up to 25,000 pounds of dough a day and deliver fresh bread daily to the other five locations in San Francisco. He’s also in charge of the bakers at Boudin’s 12 other restaurant-bakeries around Northern California, from San Jose to Walnut Creek. And yes, he eats his chowder from a bread bowl, just like the rest of us.
Here’s how Boudin’s master baker helps keep a Gold Rush company relevant today.
Q
How do you come up with your new bread recipes?
A
Sometimes it’s just a passion I have for a particular bread, or it’s a seasonal flavor or a trend. The most important thing is that the (original sourdough) recipe needs to be tweaked to keep the flavors in balance. For our
chocolate bread, we add dark chocolate and cocoa powder and then cut back on the mother dough so it’s not too sour and allows the chocolate flavor to come out.
Q
What was the most valuable thing “Papa” Steve taught you?
A
Taking care of the mother dough. To keep something alive for so long? It’s just incredible. We treat it like a part of our family. Every day you have to feed it with flour and water and a little air. When you incorporate air into dough, it has the essence of the city in it. I can’t say I own it because it truly belongs to the city of San Francisco, just like the Golden Gate Bridge or Coit Tower.
Q
Who saved the starter during the 1906 earthquake?
A
Louise, Isidore’s wife. It was pretty early in the morning. As the earth shook, she scooped the mother dough into a wooden bucket and fled the bakery.
Q
Do you ship bread to your restaurants outside San Francisco?
A
We ship the mother dough to them every four weeks. We mix and ferment it here in San Francisco, then put it in a bag, seal it and surround it with cold packs. We send them 50 pounds of it at a time, which makes 200 pounds of dough for bread. This costs about $250 per shipment.
Q
How did Boudin’s whimsical shapes and critter breads come about?
A
About six months after I started, there was a crab festival here, so we decided to try and shape our bread into a crab. We learned you have to do it when the dough is fresh and malleable enough, like Play-doh, to be shaped. The temperature has to be between 75 and 82 degrees. Higher than that and it becomes stiff. Ever since, we’ve done hearts for Valentine’s Day, three-leaf clovers for St. Patrick’s Day, Easter bunnies. For Thanksgiving, we do turkeys with rolls (as a plumed tail) that people can tear off. That’s been really popular.
Q
We heard you made saxophones for President Clinton’s inauguration. Um, how?
A
Yes, we made over 2,000 saxophone-shaped sourdoughs. We shaped and curled the horns, made the buttons with sourdough dots, baked them light and asked the chefs over there to stick them in the oven for five minutes before serving to crisp them up a bit.
Q
Be honest — do you eat your soup out of a bread bowl?
A
Yes. (Laughs) I don’t have enough bread to eat (with) my soup, so eventually I tilt my bread bowl and tear it off the sides. Never trust a skinny baker is what they say, right? What’s interesting is that in the past five years sourdough has been exploding in popularity as people learn about the benefits of fermented foods. Sourdough bread is actually good for your gut.