01
Learn sourdough
A beginner sequence from what sourdough is through baking and judging trouble in the loaf.
Read this pageBread · craft · San Francisco
Food knowledge you can use.
Start with a food question. Learn what the ingredients and processes are doing, then decide what to try, measure, or read next. Sourdough is one way in; the same approach works for cheese, preserving, wine, and more.
Choose a starting point
What are you looking for?
Start with a question, then follow the links into the encyclopedia.
- Learn a craftFollow a subject from first principles to practice.
- Bake breadStart with ingredients, then mix, ferment, and bake.
- Look up a termFind an ingredient, mechanism, or formula.
- Preserve foodLearn where quality advice ends and safety guidance begins.
- Explore local foodBrowse bakeries, markets, dairies, and more across the Bay Area.
- Follow a connectionSee how entries link to ingredients, places, and techniques.
- Practice breadTake bread questions into classes and hands-on work.
- Read La VictoriaTrace pan dulce, people, and place in the Mission.
A good place to start
Start with bread
Bread brings together affordable ingredients, fermentation, heat, timing, and touch in one useful place to begin.
02
Country loaf (teaching formula)
A straightforward sourdough country loaf in baker’s percentages, written as a practice formula rather than a copy of any bakery’s published recipe.
Read this page03
San Francisco sourdough
A civic bread story, a commercial bakery style, and a laboratory isolation — three layers that are easy to mash into one myth.
Read this pageHow to use the site
Start with a question, then follow it
Move from a learning path to a focused page, then to a formula or a troubleshooting guide when you are ready to try something.
01 · Start
Choose a path
See who the path is for, what it covers, and why the pages are in that order.
02 · Read
Understand the process
Follow the ingredients, organisms, structure, heat, and time behind the result.
03 · Try
Use a formula
Put the idea into practice with a formula that makes the important variables visible.
04 · Adjust
Start with the symptom
Use what you can see to name a likely variable and choose the next test.
Bread and place in San Francisco
Two local stories to follow
Sour Flour is where bread study becomes hands-on. La Victoria SF has its own Mission history, carried through pan dulce, people, and a shared kitchen.
Bread practice
From reading about bread to practicing it
Gourmet Gastronomer explains bread and other food processes. Sour Flour turns bread questions into classes, baking, and community in San Francisco.
Pan dulce, people, and 24th Street
A San Francisco bakery with its own story
Follow La Victoria from Gabriel and Jaime Maldonado through the shared kitchen where Sour Flour began baking, the 2018 closure, and Laura Hernandez and Danny Gabriner’s return to 24th Street.
Places behind the food
The Bay Area food network
These entries connect local ingredients, working places, and the people who keep food crafts going.
- La Victoria SFA Mexican panaderia on San Francisco's 24th Street that carries people, recipes, and neighborhood memory forward from the earlier La Victoria Bakery.
- Acme Bread CompanyA Berkeley bakery founded in 1983 to supply restaurants with long-fermented hearth bread, later also baking at the San Francisco Ferry Building.
- Arizmendi Bakery (9th Avenue)A worker-owned cooperative bakery in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset, part of a Bay Area network that began from Cheese Board recipes and know-how.
- Boudin BakeryA San Francisco bakery dating its sour French bread to 1849, still operating in the city, and the usual public face of “San Francisco sourdough.”
- Semifreddi'sAn East Bay bakery, opened in Kensington in 1984, that supplies bread and pastry across the Bay Area from a production plant and a Colusa Avenue cafe.
Learning paths
Learning paths
Each path groups pages around a question: bread, cheese, jam, wine, pickles, grain, dairy, oil, or the Bay Area food network.
A reading path through bread books, matched to the questions they answer and the baking decisions they can improve.
A short geographic walk from Mission pan dulce and San Francisco bread into grain, markets, North Bay dairy, fruit, jam, and wine country.
One biology — microbes transforming sugar — applied in bread, cheese, wine, and sour vegetables without copying each craft's textbook.
A sequence from the wheat kernel through milling, flour, baker's math, and a teaching loaf, landing at Bay Area grain places.
A sequence from milk and cream through yogurt, coagulation, and named cheeses, using North Bay dairies as geography not a shopping list.
A sequence from weighing and baker's percentage through hydration, preferments, and dough temperature so a formula can be scaled and controlled.
From a safe probe and a sharp knife to sauté, roast, simmer, and braise — then the rest that still cooks — without treating a timer as doneness.
From food safety and sanitation to California’s homemade-food sales rules — a permit is local, and a tested jam is not automatically legal to sell.
From shared fermentation to honey wine, cider, and beer — without treating grape wine as the only alcoholic ferment.
A sequence from fruit through pectin, sugar, acid, gel, and canning safety, ending in a tested strawberry formula.
From why even pieces matter to how to hold the knife — then mise and a clean board — without a table of unsourced millimeter cuts.
A sequence from the fruit through graded extra virgin oil to tasting, with California as geography rather than a brand directory.
A sequence from acid and salt through fermented cabbage and vinegar pickles, keeping canning safety on its own page.
A beginner sequence from what sourdough is through baking and judging trouble in the loaf.
A sequence from grape and fermentation through acidity and tannin to a practical tasting method.
A sequence from milk through cultures, coagulation, curd, salt, affinage, and tasting, with each stage building on the last.
Browse by subject
The rest of the library
Browse from technique to ingredient, science, place, and back again. The maps show how the sections connect.
- Baking56
The craft of using heat to turn dough and batter into bread, pastry, and other baked foods.
- Cheese33
Milk concentrated and transformed by acidification, coagulation, whey removal, salt, and time into a food whose texture and flavor keep changing.
Methods for keeping food edible longer with sugar, acid, salt, drying, cold, or heat; canning adds a tested heat process for shelf storage.
- Wine24
A fermented drink from grapes, whose structure is alcohol, acid, tannin, and aroma shaped by vineyard, yeast, and time.
Fermented drinks made from honey, apples, malt, and tea, with grape wine treated separately.
Ingredients used across the site, from flour, water, and salt to milk, fruit, grains, oils, and spices.
- Science30
Food mechanisms shared by baking, cheesemaking, preserving, and drinks.
- Skills20
Kitchen practices that apply across baking, cooking, preserving, and tasting.
- Atlas39
San Francisco and Bay Area food places, connected to the crafts and ingredients described in the encyclopedia.
Recipes and baker’s-percentage formulas that put food science and technique into practice.
- Learn17
Ordered sequences of pages and practices that move from a food question to the ideas needed to answer it.
Search