Nostalgia: Freshly-Baked and Ready to Serve

“Do you know what makes San Francisco’s sourdough bread so special?” my host asked somewhat conspiratorially as we traipsed along Fisherman’s Wharf, the sea-salted wind blowing our loose hair into each other’s excited faces.

Fisherman's Wharf, brimming with nautical allure.

As it turns out, salt isn’t the only thing floating around in the San Francisco air. A culture of lactobacillus bacteria that thrives exclusively in the climate of the San Francisco Bay Area works with cultivated yeast to form San Francisco sourdough. A French baker by the name of Isidore Boudin used the ancient bread-making technique of local Gold Rush miners and merged it with his home country’s baking traditions to create a culinary masterpiece that has been around for more than a century.

Generations later, Boudin bakers create the same heavenly sourdough bread from the same recipe and yeast-bacteria culture that Isidore Boudin used more than a century ago. Photo by Gigi Calvo.

Bread has always been a source of solace for me. Every morning, my household buys a brown bag of piping-hot pan de sal, cooked using a traditional pugon or wood-fired oven—a staple in our family breakfasts. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to frequent a bakeshop run by workers from the nearby enclaves. After a particularly stressful exam day, a trip to that bakeshop would provide us with warm comfort in the form of soft cheese-filled bread—the perfect blend of salty and sweet—and saccharine chocolate crinkles, lightly dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Not surprisingly, the excitement I felt at tasting a new kind of bread in San Francisco was unusually intense.

The author demonstrates the best way to ride a cable car. Careful, though!

The stately monument lies smack in the middle of Union Square at downtown San Francisco. Photo by Gigi Calvo.

 One can almost smell the aroma of rich, smooth milk chocolate in this picture of the world-famous Ghirardelli Square, its fountain adorned with lovely granite mermaids. Photo by Glady Serrano.

Prior to the trip, however, I wasn’t even aware of the fact that San Francisco had some sort of special bread tucked in its overflowing belt of marvels. We just got off the iconic cable car, deemed a National Historical Landmark by the United States government, after a few hours of strolling around Union Square, shopping for chocolates at Ghirardelli Square, and taking pictures of the delicately restored Victorian-style houses. It was midday—though the perennially cool weather in the Bay Area seemed to belie it—and we were hungry for an invigorating seaside lunch.

Pier 39, one of San Francisco's premier attractions. Photo by Gigi Calvo.

Finally, after a few more minutes of walking, I was led inside a bakery dominated by rich, bright red colors, the incessant chatter of customers, and, of course, the ambrosial smell of sourdough bread. It was the Pier 39 branch of Boudin Bakery, where they use the very same yeast-bacteria culture that Isidore Boudin developed several generations hence. My hunger pangs intensified.

Follow your nose and this enormous Boudin Bakery and Cafe sign will loom into view: you wouldn't miss it. Photo by Gigi Calvo.

 They also sell all sorts of merchandise, from aprons and mugs to cookbooks and crab hats, complete with googly eyes. Photo by Glady Serrano.

I am a very picky eater, and clam is one of the many types of food that I would flat out refuse to bring anywhere near my mouth. Perhaps my host secretly knew about this and fully intended to bring me to my final threshold of starvation just so I can taste one of Fisherman Wharf’s must-try dishes: New England-style clam chowder. I ended up ordering a thick, steaming bowl of clam chowder along with my chicken pesto sourdough sandwich.

The place was packed; we thanked the high heavens that a vacant table was waiting for us outside. We would have preferred a warmer place to eat in, but our famished stomachs and that tranquil view of the sea at the pier were both potent enough to render this desire immaterial.

Boudin's chicken pesto sandwich and clam chowder, half-devoured by a hungry tourist (read: me). Photo by Glady Serrano.

The bread had an uncharacteristically tangy taste to it, which was only slightly masked by the chicken pesto filling. Its crust was tougher than a toenail, but the inside was pillow-soft. I devoured the clam chowder as though I’ve been eating it my entire life. The thick soup was pure white, like liquid cloud. I have this nasty eating habit in which I try to identify the ingredients of different dishes, so I could remove the ones I don’t eat. This habit is so well-formed, my own mother told me I could work at a silicon chip factory putting it to good use. But when I was eating the chowder, it was like I never even had that habit at all. I remember feeling more satisfied than I thought I would be for a meal comparatively scant when juxtaposed with the multiple servings of food I normally consumed in American buffet restaurants. 

Now, I am no city girl. My old high school was practically a vast meadow of greenery atop the highest hills of Rizal, and I spent all of my twenty years living in a relatively obscure town in the same province. I take unbridled pleasure in fresh mountain air and an unobstructed view of the vast horizon. It is no small wonder that when I first stepped into college, I felt like I was thrust into a dizzying world of glass-and-concrete Tower of Babels, filled with suspicious glances and hurried strides and riddled with vagabonds and peddlers, as cars whizzed past and disappeared in a carcinogenic haze of smoke.

I wondered if San Francisco was any different. Take away the reputation and the prestige of being one of America’s most popular destinations, and the fact remains that it is still a city. The asphalt streets of Fisherman’s Wharf were lined with all manner of establishments, most of them—from electronic shops to drugstores—carrying souvenir items for tourists: keychains, refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, caps, small-scale models of the Golden Gate Bridge, all proudly emblazoned with the city’s name.

The dime-a-dozen tourist draws common to most world-famous destinations, however, fails to camouflage the irrepressible old-world charm of the city. San Francisco is an open defiance to the notion that all renowned cities, especially in highly urbanized America, were smog-filled concrete jungles, the unbearable din of rumbling engines and angry car horns deluging the ear drums and the crushing mass of people at rush hour seemingly pressing against the very core of the primeval spirit.

 The Victorian architecture in downtown San Francisco, as well as the residential houses all across the city, perfectly capture the romance and charm of the era.

Sedans leisurely steered their way past us, the steep streets too dangerous for Tokyo Drift-style driving. Sleek four-wheel drives were painstakingly parked outside elegant houses of the Victorian era. College students, iPods in tow, spent their lunch break padding out their thumbs on their cellphones while lining up to get their hands on some bread made using a century-old recipe. San Francisco is a city immortalized “in the amber of the moment,” as American writer Kurt Vonnegut puts it.

That moment must have been glorious, because it was palpable not just in the colors and sounds and the structures, but also in the shuffling footsteps and the ostensibly idle chatter of the city dwellers scattered along its rolling hills. Just as the pan de sal evokes memories of tranquil breakfasts and the chocolate crinkles recall the company of longtime friends, the sourdough bread that is uniquely San Francisco embodies a city replete with the comfort and nostalgia of days long gone—the kind I never found in urban jungles, until now. And it wants you to remember. 

Never leave San Francisco without visiting the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

 Glady, my Korus roommate, and I enjoy a breathtaking view at the Twin Peaks, two hills right at the center of the city. Photo by Glady Serrano.