In my previous JSVB Post, I mentioned the historic Boudin Bakery on Fishermen's Wharf in San Francisco. Boudin is especially famous for their excellent sourdough bread.
It's a large facility, more of a factory than most bakeries I have seen. The centerpiece is a gigantic bread-making robot the size of a semi truck and trailer. Boudin started simply in 1849 with a recipe and deep knowledge of French baking. The Boudin sourdough mother has been in use continuously since then.
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| Half of the Boudin Bread Machine. This motorized rack assembles and prepares sourdough loaves. |
With almost unprecedented stupidity, I inquired if Boudin sold their starter. They laughed. It would be like asking Batman for the keys to the Batmobile.
AS it is, sourdough starter is only slightly less complicated than the Batmobile. There is a delicate balance between the wild yeast Candida milleri and the bacteria Lactobactillus sanfranscisensis that preserves acidity and sugar content: it turns out these two constituents help each other within the dough by providing symbiotic benefits. Then there are considerations like protein and ash content in the flour and the temperature and liquid level of the dough.
So, a well-cultured mother is valuable to a bakery. There are so many variables that if the mother were lost, a bakery could be ruined. Re-creating a mother is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. In the great earthquake of 1906, the Boudin Bakery was gutted by fire. One of the bakers managed to rescue a bucketful of the mother by risking his life in the flames. Without this brave act, the bakery would never have been rebuilt.
Another disaster was averted in 2016 when San Francisco hosted the Superbowl and there was such a run on sourdough bread that Boudin's nearly used up all of their starter. It took the bakery some months to recover their stock.
I discovered that Boudin has safeguards in place to protect their mother. The main vault is in a secured area separate from the factory floor. Then there other locations in San Francisco and California that have secondary vaults so that if disaster strikes the primary mother, there are other sister mothers that should remain safe from harm.
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| The Vault. What I wouldn't give to plunder its secrets! |
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