Dirty Little Secret

Meet the wee, multilegged chefs behind the world’s most sought-after loaves.

- Charlotte Druckman And Kevin Gray

It’s easy to get a rise out of a local TV news crew. Especially in a slo-mo state capital like California’s. So it was on September 6, 2007, when KCRA’s LiveCopter 3 hovered over a Sacramento parking lot, at 8:23 a.m., beaming images of a slow- moving red van, tailed by a black-and-white police cruiser. As soon as the van pulled over, a man in a white baker’s cap popped out. Instead of making a run for it, which is how you expect these things to play out, he labored up to a reporter’s microphone, arms weighed down by bread dough. “It’s about 40 pounds,” he said. A crowd of bystanders cheered.

The Boudin Bakery in San Francisco, the city’s oldest and one of the best-known purveyors of its famous sourdough bread, was delivering a key piece of its history to its newest outpost. Since 1849, the bakery has relied on a bacteria and-yeast-rich “starter”—a small amount of dough that bakers regularly “feed” by adding flour and water—to breed the living organisms that make the bread rise and give sourdough its tang. Properly cared for, a starter can birth billions of chewy loaves across decades and even centuries.

The predominant bacteria in sourdough is called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. It’s a species that produces lactic and acetic acids, which give sourdough its distinctive and nominal flavor. For decades, foodies believed, as did Boudin’s bakers and others, that the city’s fog and temperate climate helped foster these microorganisms. As it turns out, they may come from insects.

In July 2017, baker Ian Lowe responded to a bit of news that revealed an unusual connection between bugs and bread, and that had attracted his community of sourdough devotees: “It’s time bug shit got its due,” he told his more than 28,000 Instagram followers.