In a city with a world renowned versatile culinary scene one thing is still hard to get: Good German bread.
You can find some great French and Italian bakeries, like the ‘mecca of sour-style bread’, Boudin Bakery, but that’s still a far cry from what Germans or Austrians call bread. First World Problems perhaps, but “where can I get ‘real’ bread?” is the question that many Germans and Austrians ask when coming to the United States.
You may be familiar with Vollkornbrot or Pumpernickel, but there’s more than that. A lot more.
In 2015, the German baker’s guild counted over 730 different breads in Germany and another 300 in Austria.
Every city and town has it’s own recipes for breads, and some bakers’ secrets may have been kept for many hundred years. One of the oldest bakeries in Austria is run by the Höllbacher Family in Ranshofen, Upper Austria. The abbey bakery “Höllbacher” has been in business since 1125. The oldest bakery in Germany, the “Freibackhaus” in Lübeck, has existed since 1293.
But much closer to home, you can also get German-style bread at “The Mill” in San Francisco on Divisadero Street next to Alamo Square Park. There you’ll find Dark Mountain Rye bread -- which consists of 100% rye, and Red White & Rye bread -- another 100% whole grain bread. Stored on a self-service bakery shelf you can also find an ‘updated’ version of good old Wonder Bread: A sandwich loaf, but it’s whole grain and made of sourdough.
Josey Baker, the owner of Josey Baker Bread (yes, “Baker” is his real name) co-runs “The Mill” with Four Barrel Coffee. In the last couple of years, “The Mill” has become a favorite buying and hang out spot for fans of German-style whole grain bread. Josey Baker himself doesn’t have a German family background at all; he was born in New York and raised in Vermont. His passion for whole grain, handmade bread developed more or less accidentally.
“I never had a big plan. I fell in love with baking and started doing it all the time,” says Baker.
“The first time that I baked a loaf of sourdough bread was in the spring of 2010. My friend George, who I grew up with in Vermont, was backpacking through town and he had some sourdough starter and he gifted me a little chunk of it and scribbled down some instructions. I tried it a few days later and was really surprised!” he adds.
Back then, Baker was living in a shared apartment in the Mission district. Within a few weeks, he was baking all the time. He baked so much bread, that he couldn't store or eat it. So he offered his bread to friends. His fan base began to grow fast.
“And then on Thanksgiving morning in 2010, 60 people showed up at my front door in the Mission. That’s when I was like ‘ok, this is turning into something. I am gonna go for it.' And I went for it,” says Baker.
Baker quit his day job and started his own business. In 2012 he opened up ‘The Mill’, which features the one and only flour mill in San Francisco. The heart of the bakery is the first mill he bought: A pine wood flour mill that he imported from Austria.
“When I first tried baking with this flour and tried some bread it was unlike anything I ever had before. So I decided that I wanted to do that myself”, Baker says.
Now, Josey Baker bakes about 400 loaves a day. But he says he doesn’t want to grow bigger, because the quality of the bread would suffer. And that attention to detail can even help people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
“Every single person who has come into the bakery and said, ‘well I can’t eat bread, I really miss bread, and you know this looks nice’, I say ‘well, just try a loaf of the rye bread!’” explains Baker.
“Most people who are nervous about eating bread are more likely to try rye because it has less gluten than wheat. And they try that bread and they can not believe it, that they are feeling good after eating it. But there is nothing magic about our bread. We’re making fresh milled-whole grain-sourdough bread. We’re not making factory-made under-hydrated commercial yeast not baked enough bread,” says Baker proudly.