Tartine Bakery is a narrow storefront on the corner of 18th and Guerrero in San Francisco’s Mission District. It opens every day, and every day around 5pm a line forms on the sidewalk. By 5:30, it frequently wraps around the block. By 6pm, the bread is sold out. The bakery bakes roughly 200 loaves on a good day — all of it gone before dinner.
Chad Robertson opened Tartine with his wife, pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt, in 2002. He had spent years studying bread in France, first as a student and then working in a wood-fired bakery in the Auvergne, where he became fixated on the particular style of country loaf — the pain de campagne — that French bakers had been making for centuries: a high-hydration, long-fermented white-and-wheat blend baked in a stone deck oven with plenty of steam, producing a thick, crackling crust and an open, irregular crumb.
His version became one of the most famous loaves in American food. In 2010, he published Tartine Bread (Chronicle Books), one of the most influential cookbooks in the home baking revival — and the recipe, the one that is the subject of this page, became the recipe that launched a hundred thousand home sourdough starters.
What Makes Tartine Country Bread Different
The formula is not complicated. 900 grams of bread flour, 100 grams of whole wheat flour, 750 grams of water, 200 grams of ripe leaven, 20 grams of salt. That is it.
The difference is not in the ingredients. It is in three specific choices Robertson makes that separate his bread from most home sourdough.
He uses a young leaven. Most sourdough recipes use a mature starter — left to ferment at full peak or slightly beyond, where acetic and lactic acid have built up significantly. Robertson builds a fresh leaven each morning from a tablespoon of old starter, catches it before it peaks, and bakes with it young. A young leaven has mild acidity. The bread it produces is nutty, lightly tangy, almost sweet — not the assertive sourness most people associate with San Francisco sourdough. This is not a coincidence; it is the result Robertson is aiming for.
He uses high hydration. At 75% hydration (and effectively higher when the leaven’s water is factored in), the dough is very wet. It cannot be kneaded in the traditional sense — it would stick to everything and stick to itself. Instead, Robertson developed a stretch-and-fold method: periodically pulling sections of the dough up and folding them over the mass during bulk fermentation, building gluten strength in stages rather than all at once. High hydration is what produces the open, hole-riddled crumb that makes Tartine bread visually distinctive.
He bakes in a Dutch oven. Professional deck ovens inject steam during the first stage of baking, which keeps the crust surface supple during oven spring and lets the loaf expand without tearing. A home oven has no steam mechanism. Robertson’s solution is a preheated cast-iron Dutch oven: the loaf’s own moisture, trapped inside the covered pot, creates the necessary steam environment for the first 20 minutes, replicating the deck oven’s steam phase in a way that nothing else in a home kitchen can match.
The Equipment You Actually Need
You do not need specialty equipment to make this bread, but you need the right things.
A kitchen scale is non-negotiable. A cup of bread flour, depending on how it is scooped, can weigh anywhere from 120 to 160 grams. Those 40 grams — a 25% variance — is the difference between a 75% hydration dough and a 62% hydration dough. Those are fundamentally different doughs. Use weight for everything, including the water.
Two proofing baskets (bannetons), one for each loaf. If you do not have bannetons, two bowls lined with generously floured clean kitchen towels will work. Rice flour is the right dusting agent — it does not absorb back into the dough during the long cold proof the way wheat flour does, and the loaves release cleanly. If you only have bread flour, use it, but dust heavily and add more than you think you need.
A 5- or 6-quart Dutch oven with a lid. Enameled cast iron (Le Creuset, Staub) or bare cast iron both work well. The pot must preheat inside the oven for a full 45 minutes; insufficiently preheated cast iron is the most common reason home bakers get thin, pale crusts.
A lame (bread scoring tool) or a single-edge razor blade. The scoring cut before baking is not decorative — it controls where the loaf opens as it expands, directing oven spring upward rather than sideways or along an uncontrolled tear. A dull knife drags the dough; a razor cut is clean and decisive.
The Process: A Two-Day Schedule
This bread does not require two days of active work — it requires two days of calendar time, most of which you are sleeping or doing other things. The actual hands-on time is under an hour.
Night before: Build the leaven. 8–12 hours later, it is ready.
Morning, day 2: Mix the dough (10 minutes). Autolyse (30–40 minutes of rest). Add leaven and salt (15 minutes). Bulk fermentation with stretch-and-folds (3–4 hours, with maybe 15 total minutes of active work). Divide, pre-shape, bench rest, final shape (30 minutes). Load into bannetons, refrigerate.
Morning, day 3 (or the same evening): Preheat oven, bake, cool.
The cold retard in the refrigerator is not mandatory, but it is strongly recommended. The overnight slow fermentation in the cold develops a complexity of flavor — specifically acetic acid notes — that same-day proofing at room temperature cannot match. More practically, it means you are not racing the dough: you shape at your convenience, refrigerate, and bake whenever you are ready in the next 12–48 hours.
Reading the Dough
Bread is not a formula you execute — it is a biological process you read and respond to. The times given are guidelines based on a 78°F kitchen; your kitchen may be cooler or warmer, your starter stronger or weaker, your flour older or newer.
The signs that matter are not times. They are behaviors. The leaven is ready when it floats and the dome is still high. The bulk ferment is done when the dough has grown 25–30%, feels light and airy when you handle it, and leaves small bubbles visible through the bowl walls. The cold-proofed loaf is ready to bake when it has risen slightly in the banneton overnight but still feels firm and cold.
If your dough feels slack and sticky — almost liquid — during shaping, it is likely over-fermented: the gluten has been degraded by acidity and time. If it tears during stretch-and-folds and does not smooth back together, it may be under-hydrated or the flour is old. If the baked loaf is dense with small, uniform bubbles, the bulk ferment was probably too short or too cold.
None of these are disasters. They are information. Sourdough baking is a skill built over dozens of loaves, not one.
On the Crust Color
Robertson bakes dark. His crust is deep mahogany with near-black patches at the scoring line and along any blisters — a color most home bakers would instinctively pull from the oven 10 minutes early.
Do not. The dark color is the point. The Maillard reaction and caramelization at those temperatures create hundreds of flavor compounds that a pale tan crust does not contain. A thick, darkly baked crust is what shatters audibly when you press it with your thumb. It is what crackles on the cooling rack. A pale crust is papery.
When the second loaf comes out of the oven, set it on a wire rack and leave the room. Come back in fifteen minutes and listen: a properly baked Tartine loaf cracks and pops as it cools — Robertson calls this the loaf “singing.” If you hear it, you did it right.
