01
Learn sourdough
A beginner sequence from what sourdough is through baking and judging trouble in the loaf.
Open this guideBread · craft · San Francisco
Food knowledge you can use.
Understand the ingredient, read what the food is doing, and make the next move with confidence. Start with sourdough, then follow the connections across the whole food world.
Choose a goal
Where do you want to go?
Begin with an intention; the taxonomy will meet you there.
- Start a guided pathLearn a craft in a useful sequence.
- Understand breadUnderstand → mix → ferment → bake.
- Look up a termFind an ingredient, mechanism, or formula.
- Preserve safelySeparate quality questions from safety claims.
- Explore local foodWalk the Bay Area food world.
- See the connectionsBrowse the corpus as a visual map.
- Practice breadTake bread knowledge into hands-on practice.
The clearest way in
Start with bread
Bread turns a few affordable ingredients into a complete education in fermentation, heat, time, touch, and place.
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.
Open this guide03
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.
Open this guideA way through the encyclopedia
Learn by seeing the next move
Enter with a question, then move from a short path to a canonical page, a practice formula, and an evidence-based correction.
01 · Spine
Follow a sequence
See who the path is for, what you will be able to notice, and why the steps belong in this order.
02 · Branch
Open the mechanism
Move into ingredients, organisms, structure, heat, and time without losing the practical question.
03 · Practice
Test the idea
Use a teaching formula that makes the variables visible and gives you something real to inspect.
04 · Connect
Troubleshoot, then wander
Start from what you can see, name the likely variable, and follow the next useful branch.
From food knowledge to bread in practice
The path from Gourmet Gastronomer to Sour Flour
Gourmet Gastronomer came first as a map of the food world. Sour Flour grew from its bread knowledge into hands-on learning and baking in San Francisco. The projects share a lineage while serving different jobs.
The local table
The San Francisco food world
Places matter because craft is practiced somewhere, by real people, with local materials and histories.
- 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.
- Tartine BakeryA San Francisco bakery on Guerrero Street, known publicly for bread and pastry, with a long-running connection to San Francisco’s bread culture.
Curated sequences
Learn paths
Each path is a playlist of encyclopedia pages — bread, cheese, jam, wine, pickles, grain, dairy, oil, and the Bay Area map.
A curated reading path through the strongest bread books, matched to the questions they answer and the baking decisions they can improve.
A short geographic walk from 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 tasting method, without scoring theater.
A sequence from milk through cultures, coagulation, curd, salt, affinage, and tasting, with each stage building on the last.
Wander with purpose
Explore the food library
Move from technique to ingredient, science, place, and back again. Every section is part of the same map. Open the visual maps.
- Baking56
The craft of transforming dough and batter with heat, from bread and pastry to the professional bakery.
- Cheese33
Milk concentrated and transformed by acidification, coagulation, whey removal, salt, and time into a food whose texture and flavor keep changing.
Holding harvests with sugar, acid, salt, dryness, cold, or heat so food remains worth eating later — and, when canned, remains safe at room temperature.
- Wine24
A fermented drink from grapes, whose structure is alcohol, acid, tannin, and aroma shaped by vineyard, yeast, and time.
Fermented drinks that are not grape wine — mead from honey, cider from apples, beer from malt and hops — sharing yeast metabolism, not a cellar.
Shared matter: the flours, waters, salts, milks, and sugars that several crafts use without owning.
- Science30
Shared mechanisms — fermentation, gluten, pectin, starch, enzymes — that several crafts use without duplicating the explanation.
- Skills20
Transferable kitchen practices — tasting, food safety, weighing, temperature — that no single craft should own.
- Atlas38
Places in the San Francisco and Bay Area food world, connected to the crafts and ingredients in the encyclopedia.
Recipes and baker’s-percentage formulas that put food science and technique into practice.
- Learn17
Curated sequences that lead from one food idea to the next, with each pathway arranged for practice and understanding.
Map
See the corpus
Constellation, treemap, connections, schematic atlas, and pathways.
Search