Bay Area sourdough bread has evolved with unusual flavor combinations

What do chocolate, gochujang, lemon peel, squid ink, ube, miso, seaweed and carrot water have in common?

I know it reads like the recipe list for an invisibility potion, but this chaotic array of flavors might be exactly what you find in your next loaf of sourdough bread. (Not all together though… yet.)

In the Bay Area, many bakers are deviating from tradition and mixing unusual ingredients into the dough. I'm not talking about a simple round loaf with seeds, nor am I referring to a Christmas loaf with walnuts and raisins. No, I'm referring to the sourdough side of what bakers call inclusion breads. This sourdough – with a wide range of flavors and ingredients added in the dough itself – is virtually impossible to miss, especially since some of them are now bright purple or amber in color.

In San Francisco, I look for garlic confit and thyme bread from Rize Up Bakery and seaweed-infused loaves from Bob's Bread Co. When I'm traveling on the Peninsula, I'll head to Backhaus and get a loaf with asiago pepper. If I'm traveling through the South Bay, I might pick up a kinako (soybean powder) loaf from Milk Belly Bakery. Each loaf is more unique than the last.

This style of bread-making, an art that dates back thousands of years, can hardly be called “new,” since even the addition of a single sesame seed could be considered an addition. However, these unconventional breads take things a step further and push the boundaries of what's possible. For some bakers, baking this type of bread is a creative exercise in the hopes of setting their work apart, while others use sourdough as a forum for cultural expression.

An early adopter and muse for bakers is the pioneering San Francisco company Tartine, whose oatmeal has a loyal following. One ardent fan was Bob Rosner, who runs the micro-bakery Bob's Bread Co. In the early months of the pandemic, Tartine stopped making Rosner's favorite bread, so he decided to bake the oatmeal himself.

This led him to try more unusual combinations, such as a bread with olive oil, lemon zest and za'atar spice or another with nori sheets and black sesame seeds.

“Anyone can make country bread, but I want that wow factor,” Rosner told me. I tried loaves from Bob's Bread Co. at Dolores Deluxe Market in San Francisco, where Rosner delivers them weekly. Visually the most intriguing was the nori and black sesame loaf, with its moody interior and crust like dark tree bark. Its flavor is complex with umami and nutty notes from seaweed. (Tartine was also the inspiration for this bread, based on a competition loaf baked over 10 years ago, Rosner claims.) The za'atar bread tasted good and zesty, but the texture wasn't there yet, bordering on rubbery.

Anne Moser, owner of Backhaus, is also dabbling in this style of bread, making recent examples like polenta rosemary, chocolate and Aleppo pepper with cheese. But at her company, which has locations in Burlingame and San Mateo, these types of bread make up a much smaller portion of production, so the team is getting creative with the ingredients – like the chocolate bread, which includes cocoa powder, honey and small chocolate chips.

Backhaus' delicious Asiago and black pepper, with an interior full of shiny little caves of cheese, put the bakery on my list of best sourdough breads. It has a pleasant tangy warmth and aged cheese provides a rich saltiness. A toasted slice effortlessly becomes cheese bread with enhanced flavor.

The most prominent voice in this sourdough genre is Rize Up Bakery, inspired by a desire to bring more cultural representation into breadmaking — “to make people feel seen,” founder Azikiwee “Z” Anderson told me. His creations recall Indian, Filipino and Korean influences, with breads like a fragrant golden masala loaf, an homage to South Indian bread baked with Leena Trivedi, Anderson’s cookbook columnist, combining spices, chilies and herbs.

While other bakers offer a limited number of inclusion breads, Rize Up's unconventional breads are the most popular – and available in several grocery stores throughout the Bay Area. If I had to recommend one, it would be the K-Pop, a bulbous, almost flaky bread made with garlic, black sesame seeds, and gochujang – the source of its reddish-orange color. Untoasted, the bread has a faint, sweet spice flavor, but toasting activates dormant cheese notes. Make it into an exceptional grilled cheese sandwich to which you can add kimchi.

Jason Venters and Maria Belzunce, the couple behind Milk Belly in San Jose, also pay tribute to their heritage through bread. The ube coconut sourdough is a nod to Belzunce's Filipino roots, while ingredients like hojicha tea, kinako and black sesame honor Ventor's Japanese-Hawaiian heritage. I like hojicha with bee pollen (or honey, depending on the week), where the toasted tea notes are tempered by sweetness. The kinako, on the other hand, has caramel and nutty undertones. “I get bored,” Belzunce told me. If it were up to her, she'd make her mochi porridge loaf more often, but it's “fickle.”

That's part of the thrill for these bakers: figuring out how to make a crazy experiment work without lacking patience or intuition. Adding honey, chocolate or oatmeal to the mix can mess up the recipe and cause the dough to behave erratically—for example, speeding up fermentation and causing the dough to roll over. Bob's Bread Co. couldn't get the recipe right for a bread that uses carrot water. Rize Up's first bread addition was spicy Louisiana sausages—they haven't been released since. Meanwhile, a special edition bread slathered with Shared Culture miso proved too expensive to make more of. Or simply, some of these one-off breads may not be to everyone's taste, so making them can be a risk.

Still, these bakers are pushing the evolution of sourdough bread in the Bay Area, tinkering with their recipes and figuring out how sourdough responds to unconventional ingredients. It may not always work, but when it does, it's a special kind of magic.

Where can I find unusual sourdough breads?

Bakery32 E Third Ave., San Mateo. backhausbread.com

Bob’s Bread Co. Located at Delores Deluxe: 3500 22nd St., San Francisco. instagram.com/bobsbreadco

Milk Belly Bakery. 949 Ruff Dr., San Jose. www.milkbellybakery.com

Rize Up Bakery. 1160 Howard St., San Francisco. rizeupsourdough.com

Reach Cesar Hernandez: [email protected]; Twitter: @cesarischafa