SF’s forgotten sourdough company and the mystery of its starter

“There was a lot of whispering around the family dinner tables about an accident and being sued,” said Julia Lavaroni, grandniece of one of the bakery’s long-time owners, Harold “Hal” Paul Sr. “After that, the bread just sort of disappeared.” 

Along with it went the sourdough starter, a live culture made up of water and flour that was responsible for Larraburu’s unique taste.

“We later discovered that Hal had put a sample of the starter in a storage facility in South San Francisco,” Lavaroni said. “But when he stopped paying monthly fees, the starter likely got thrown out.”

Over the past decade, Lavaroni has made it her mission to see if samples of Larraburu’s “mother” dough still exist elsewhere, and if so, whether this “lost taste” of San Francisco is not so lost after all. She’s even co-producing a documentary film called “Finding Larraburu” about her efforts, which she and videographer Kirk Fuller are planning to release by late 2023. 

The rise and fall of Larraburu

The Larraburu brothers first stepped onto the San Francisco food scene in 1896, when the Bay Area was already home to notable bakeries such as San Francisco’s Boudin and Parisian, as well as Toscana in Oakland. The two French brothers emigrated from Basque country, bringing their starter with them and churning out fresh loaves to city dwellers for decades.

In 1945, they sold the business to Hal Paul Sr., and a couple of business partners; with Paul becoming Larraburu’s sole owner in 1958.

“It was my uncle who said, ‘We have to grow this,’” Lavaroni said. So he took some loaves down to Fisherman’s Wharf, introducing Larraburu Brothers to restaurants such as Alioto’s. The bakery’s new owners began selling the sourdough at San Francisco International Airport as well.

Soon, Larraburu bread exploded in popularity, becoming one of the largest producers of sourdough bread in the region, if not the world. According to a 1964 New York Times article, SFO’s departing visitors were purchasing approximately 1,500 pounds of Larraburu Brothers bread each week.

But just as the bakery was furthering its expansion, a Larraburu delivery truck struck and severely injured a 6-year-old boy. The crash caused quite a blow, as the business had just come out of bankruptcy.

A lawsuit resulted in years of litigation. Paired with insurmountable debt, Larraburu Brothers was forced to cease operations in May 1976. 

Searching for its starter

Lavaroni was 13 years old when the bakery closed, and for years, she couldn’t stop thinking about whether someone, somewhere, was still making sourdough with Larraburu Brothers’ original starter.

As time went on, she occasionally Googled “Larraburu Brothers Bakery” to see whether any new leads appeared, but it was always the same blogs from people trying to recreate the sourdough recipe or newspaper articles about the lawsuit. Then one evening in 2013, Lavaroni struck gold. 

“Up popped a new article about a young chef in Austin, Texas,” said Lavaroni, referring to an Edible Austin story on Benjamin Baker, the then-executive chef of Travaasa Austin.

“In the article, he said he owed the success of his sourdough bread to the Larraburu starter, and I laughed,” she said. “There were just too many red flags.”

One in particular, Lavaroni said, was the fact that Baker was only a 2-year-old when the Larraburu Brothers went out of business. She decided to call him on it.

Lavaroni found Baker’s email address and wrote to him one evening, not expecting an answer. But by the next morning, Baker’s response was waiting in her inbox.

“He was actually thrilled that someone from the family had contacted him,” Lavaroni said.

While Baker said that he didn’t have any documentation to prove the starter’s authenticity, he believed in its pedigree and had the credentials to back it up. Baker, it turns out, is a seventh-generation Bay Area local who cooked in numerous Northern California professional kitchens before relocating to Hawaii.

It was in Maui that he met Scott Hessler, who became a “good friend, mentor and baking buddy,” Baker said. Hessler was also a renowned baker who’d cut his teeth working at Portland’s 98-year-old Helen Bernhard Bakery. There, he discovered the Larraburu starter and eventually secured a sample of his own.

“Hessler spoke of this famed sourdough starter for years, but he always kept it under lock and key,” Baker said. “Then when it was time for me to move from Hawaii, he gifted me a small piece of it to take with me. His only stipulation was that I could never give it away.”

Upon hearing Baker’s account of how he obtained a piece of living San Francisco history, it made sense. 

“It’s true that my uncle had always been very generous with the starter,” Lavaroni said. “He was confident in the fact that no one would be able to do what he did, so if someone asked him for a sample, he’d give it to him.”

The story goes that sometime in the 1970s, David Bernhard, a third-generation owner of Helen Bernhard Bakery (he eventually sold the business to another family in 1988), stopped into Larraburu Brothers in San Francisco. He told Paul that he was interested in trying out sourdough bread baking in Portland, Oregon. So Paul sent him home with some of the Larraburu starter to support his efforts. Lavaroni later checked the story with Meriel Bernhard, David’s wife, who verified it.

Lavaroni even tracked down William Sandine, an Oregon State University microbiologist who helped identify the bacteria (lactobacillus sanfrancisco) responsible for San Francisco sourdough’s unique flavor, to find out whether the integrity of the starter could even survive all these varying climates.

“He said, as long as you don’t lose your starter, you can take it anywhere,” Lavaroni said.

The Larraburu taste test

Still, the real test was to taste it. So in 2014, Lavaroni and a friend flew down to Austin to meet with Baker and Hessler to see whether the sourdough was the real deal.

“Larraburu always had a beautiful crumb,” or inside texture, Lavaroni described. “It was creamy and sour, but not like ‘turn-up-your-nose’ sour. Instead, it was a perfect tanginess that really was sort of a hallmark of that time.”

But she says what really set Larraburu Brothers apart was the crust.

“It was dark and thick and hard, with edges so hard our parents would use it to teethe us,” she recalled.

While Baker’s bread had that lingering flavor that resonates with Larraburu’s staunch fans, Lavaroni admits that the crust wasn’t quite up to par. So she told him. Baker handled the news just fine.

“He wasn’t about recreating Larraburu, but more about loving what the ‘mother’ did for his bread,” she said.

Baker also pointed out that San Francisco’s Larraburu bread was made in steam-injected, carborundum stone-lined ovens. The steam was essential to the sourdough’s signature, ultra-crispy crust, while the carborundum (aka silicon carbide) assured that the oven maintains a steady temperature for a consistent bake and crust. This kind of investment makes sense for a bakery that’s cranking out thousands of loaves per day, but not so much for an executive chef.

Crust aside, Baker’s sourdough crumb is pretty much on the mark. He even shipped loaves of the bread from Austin to San Francisco for the city’s 2015 Centennial Celebration of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Baker also made the bread for his grandparents, both lifelong Larraburu devotees.

“It was like I could see their memories flooding back when they smelled [one of my fresh loaves] in the oven,” he said. 

Baker now serves his bread made with Larraburu starter at Miraval Austin’s Hilltop Crossings Kitchen, where he’s the executive chef. The restaurant uses it for everything from bruschetta to grilled sandwiches.

As for Hessler, Baker said that he’s recently procured the rights to the Larraburu name, which has been in the hands of another famous San Francisco bakery for years. He and his daughter Noelani are planning to return the bread to the market under the moniker “Larraburu Sourdough, The People’s Bread, San Francisco, California,” in what Noelani calls “the near future.” They’re currently looking for local bakeries to partner with.

While Lavaroni still longs for that beloved taste so thoroughly enjoyed in childhood, she’s come to a conclusion over her years of research.

“Larraburu bread is manna from heaven,” she said. “It’ll never be what it was … but wow, what a story.”