Boudin Museum and Bakery Tour

I felt that this place is a bit overrated. Great location and very interesting to watch the bakers making bread. Also the bread is good. Other than that we tried a couple of things of the café menu and I was certainly not impressed. I would go to watch the bakers through the window but I highly doubt I will have a meal in the cafeteria based on my experience.

Just grabbed a loaf of bread here and devoured it with the family, for a taste of San Francisco sourdough. Excellent selection. Chaotic tourist scene, but fine for that part of town as everything is chaotic and touristy

Lots of people like to watch the creation of sourdough crabs, turtles, alligators, and teddy bears through the big picture window outside. But if you would like to learn a little sourdough history and take a look at a more automated part of the process, head inside and up the stairs to the second floor.
If you eat the café upstairs, I think you can enter the museum for free. But otherwise it’s $ 3 for adults.
This is a modest museum. You can see some of the vintage tools used by early bakers, half of a carriage used to deliver bread, and a series of old to new Boudin bread wrappers. There are also stereographic images of old San Francisco to look at. I learned that people used to put a nail on the outside of their door for bread delivery. Wouldn’t that be cool? Wake up, open your front door, and there is a fresh loaf of sourdough waiting for you.
There are interactive stations at the back. You can take a quiz to see what kind of bread you are (I think I was multigrain), and a game where you quickly load and unload virtual loaves of bread into an oven.
The best part of the back: free sourdough samples! That’s the best part of the tour.
Once you head past the fog exhibit and onto the catwalk, look down. You can watch the staff make huge batches of dough in a gigantic mixer. Then it goes down to a machine which drops a dough blob down a chute into the coolest conical machine, which rolls it into a ball. I assume next it goes into a tray to let it rise.
The only down side of the museum? It’s not free.

First of all, this tour is $ 3 and comes with free bread… that alone is a 5-​star deal considering this place is always packed and is right on Fisherman’s Wharf.
But the real reason I am giving it five stars is because this is one of the best tours I’ve been on. When I got there the docent, Suzanne, was giving background on San Francisco, the bakery, everything. She really, really knows her stuff. She was able to talk about the original settlers of the area, how the bread is made, the importance of the «mother dough» they use, the prices to get things started, the key players in 1850’s San Francisco business… it was fantastic. The museum itself is pretty small but I was probably there for over an hour listening to Suzanne tell me about the history as well as the current operations of the place. What a phenomenal treasure the Boudin business has found.
On top of the great info the museum itself is pretty fun. You can found out your bread personality (I’m a walnut), sample the famous sourdough bread (delicious), become an apprentice baker and watch the entire operation in action. They make over 12,000 loaves of bread a day there (and that’s there small facility!).
If you have kids, they have a program where you can take the kids in to make their own loaf of bread. Oh, and they can make it in the shape of a teddy bear or a sea turtle… how fun is that?!
On premise there is also a gift shop, café and full restaurant with bar. I ate in the restaurant after (I had the baked goat cheese on sourdough) and it was excellent. It was pretty busy so sat at the bar where I also had a Moscow Mule. I’m pretty picky about my mules so I asked the bartender to rate it, he said he couldn’t give it a 10 because they don’t have copper mugs but it was pretty close. After I drank it, I’d say it was 10 even without the right glassware.

This is a cool place to watch bakers strut their stuff! You get to see their assembly line from start to finish. Once inside, you are greeted with bread aroma. If you let your eyes wonder, I suggest you explore what tickles your fancy. I’m a sucker for carbs so I make a left and start eyeing at their pastries. Peet’s Coffee is also served here, and goes well with any pastries you choose!
If you decided to dine in, the 2^nd floor is just for that. So whenever you’re in Pier 39/Fisherman’s Wharf, take some time and chill here, and learn a thing or two about Boudin!
Until then, Cheers! ~ :p

I really enjoy sourdough bread and have eaten at the deli and restaurant here multiple times. My girlfriend and I decided to try the tour and it was really brief. It only cost $ 3/​person and you get free bread while learning about the baking process. It’s worth it but nothing spectacular.

Nothing against Boudin’s food or restaurants (which I find to be very, very average) and nothing against the extremely nice and knowledgeable gal who more or less gave us a personal tour when this is really a self-​guided tour, but there really is no reason on Earth for this tiny «museum» to exist.
Or, if this museum must exist, just make it free, ok? I realize $ 3 a person isn’t that much but seriously, Boudin, re-​think this one as a gesture of goodwill to all those slobs eating gummy chowder in those doughy bread bowls.
The information provided in the exhibits is interesting and presented in a professional, interesting manner. However, I think the message of this museum is muddled. Is it about the history of Boudin the company, the history of bread making, or the history of San Francisco? Or all of the above?
I feel bad saying this because the exhibits are very well done but I cannot recommend this place. Your money and time are better spent elsewhere.

A fun and educational tour with great views of the bay and an inside look at how boudin cranks out their wonderful bread!

The food was great but the service was very slow. The bread is out of this world otherwise I would have given them a 3 star rating. The view is nice too.

How can anyone not like this place? For $ 3 (or free if you ate at the restaurant) you get a very high quality mini-​museum on the history of San Francisco (with a focus on the gold rush, and bread), plus a great view of the bread-​making process. It’s almost entirely automated, so watching all the cool mechanisms and machines is a treat… I especially love the pneumatic flour delivery system between the silo and the bakery!

The Boudin Bakery Museum was one of the highlights of the trip for me. A little sad that I get excited over such a thing, but I was really curious to know why Boudin was such a big name in San Francisco, and what was going on with their sourdough bread.
Along the outside of the bakery lies a 30-​foot window where you can watch the bakers make the bread by hand. Some are simply made into rounds, while others are handcrafted into cute creatures, such as San Francisco’s infamous Dungeness crab, turtles, bears, and fish. If you have questions, you can go ahead and ask any of the workers there, and they can respond via a microphone system.
Above the bakery and the café, lies the bistro and the museum. The museum is self-​guided with a fee of $ 3 per person, which can be easily (and happily!) waived. I won’t post everything I learned here, as that would deprive you much of the fun if you were to go yourself. Some interesting points: the history of how the French family of Isidore Boudin came to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, the development of the starter dough, changes in the company’s logo as a result of a changing into Italian hands, and changes in delivery as demand increased across the nation.
Other bits of history are throughout the small museum as well, including a wall dedicated to San Francisco’s food originals! Can you guess some of them?
A lot of the museum was interactive as well, making it very family friendly. I wonder why my mom, secret lover of food, never took me here when we visited!
Okay, most exciting part! What’s the secret? It’s the FOG. San Francisco’s fog that comes around during what would normally be the hottest months of the year, makes a hospitable environment for wild yeast and Lactobacillus sanfrancisco (I kid you not) to grow with a symbiotic relationship. The wild yeast that only San Francisco bread has, Saccharomyces exiguus, is different from the commercial type used by other bakers. This species is unable to metabolize maltose, a sugar required by the Lactobacillus sanfrancisco to make lactic and acetic acid which is what makes the bread sour. In return, the Lactobacillus sanfrancisco releases glucose, happily used up by Saccharomyces exiguus, thus creating the unique flavor that only San Francisco bread can have! Science is so cool.
Next exciting part! Watching the bread being made in every step of the way! There are panels at each station describing to you what’s being done. We arrived just in time to see a finished batch of dough come out of the giant dough mixer. The mother dough, or starter, which has been kept alive for over 150 years, is kept in a refrigerated vault. For each batch, bakers take a bit of the mother dough, mix it with water, flour, and salt (and nothing else!) and combine in a giant mixer.
The dough gets transported to the lower level of the bakery and into the hopper, where it gets divided into 50-​lb pieces and into the dividing chamber. The dividing chamber, divides the dough into further smaller pieces to be rounded out in the cylindrical device, appropriately named, the rounder. This makes a smooth surface, making it for even rising when it goes into the proofer.
The intermediate proofing station allows the gluten to relax after being handled by the divider and the rounder. Without this short break, the bread would turn out tight and rubbery.
The dough then goes through a molder where it can be made into long baguette or other shapes of long bread. It can also go to a different rounding machine to make the traditional round loaves. Once shaped, they’re ready for the refrigerated retarding cabinets where they wait and ferment, further developing that sour taste. They’re then moved to the proofing cabinets for one last proof, rising double in size.
Off into the oven they go, and out comes fresh bread! The bakery had a cute transport system with wired baskets flowing throughout the entire building. Fresh bread would be placed into the baskets… and voila! Delivered to the café to be sold to customers! It’s all pretty exciting to see sourdough bread being made in a larger scale!
You can spend as much time as you’d like in the museum, and afterwards have a bite to eat at the café. I was on a mission to bring back as many clam chowder cans as I could for friends and family, and after seeing the museum, I had to add bread to the gifts! (Easily done, there’s a bakery in the food court in the main domestic wing at SFO). Don’t forget to try the best of both worlds by ordering a clam chowder bread bowl as well! Delicious! My only regret for that night: not buying the crab hat!

It’s part museum and part industrial tour. This is not the café which is downstairs along with the shop. The museum is free after dining at Bistro Boudin which is also located upstairs next to the museum.
The exhibits are straight-​forward and don’t take that long to read, but we nevertheless spent 25 minutes here because much of that time was spent watching the bakery operate.

The French… Love em’ or Hate em’, One thing that is undeniable, is their gastronomic contributions to the world, and San Francisco Sourdough is one of them… Francois Boudin (the Founder) and (Marie) Louise Erni-​She was the one responsible for saving the *mother dough* from the great earthquake of 1906 which is why we are still able to enjoy the best sourdough in the WORLD! Anyone wanna argue about that???
*Mother Dough is also known as pre-​ferment, a fermentation starter in the bread baking process
This tour has an admission fee of $ 3, but is complimentary if you dine across the way at Boudin Bistro. There were lots of cool exhibits and tidbits of history including
The Boudin Bakery Tree, One of the Carriages used in the early days, a cool fog simulator, and a wall displaying the 10 San Francisco Food Originals:
1) San Francisco Sourdough
2) Martini
3) Joe’s Special
4) Chop Suey
5) Mai Tai
6) Popsicle
7) Cioppino
8) Irish Coffee
9) Fortune Cookie
10) Crab Louis Salad
You can even observe the bakers in action cranking out every shape and form of sourdough, and even witness the dough drop which happens in a split second!
Definitely worth a visit any time you visit The Fisherman’s Wharf… ALOHA!!!
Unilocal 365 CHALLENGE-(255/365) «Thank You For Saving The Mother!»

Eating there is one thing– there joke of a tour is so LAME. (Should be Zero stars)
It’s $ 3.00 pp which is still way to much. There is about 10 mins of small mementos to look at and a view of the bakery which can be see from the street. Near the end of the tour is small pieces of sample bread — crusty and hard. Very disappointing!
I would not suggest this and actually felt ripped off — it should be FREE.

We ate at the café and then ventured upstairs for the museum. We didn’t have to pay anything but there was nobody at the desk when we walked in. I don’t know if you normally have to pay or not.
The museum is really detailed and has a lot of information about the history of San Francisco and sourdough, not just the Boudin Bakery itself. Although the downstairs was super crowded there were only a few people in the museum, which was nice. It also has some fun interactive activities.
After that is the «tour» I guess which is just where you can walk around and see the bakery from above. It has signs explaining what the machines do. I bake bread so it was really cool to see that.
If you like bread and museums I would recommend it!

What San Francisco is kinda known for. The sourdough bread bowl and clam chowder soup ;) best served on a cold bay area day while walking along pier 39 and smelling the fresh crab in the air and listening to the yelling of the sea lions. It’s just one of those things you remember doing as a kid if you grew up here.
Years ago they finally took their little cable booths off the corner and made a huge restaurant with an open glass windows to view the breads bakery while workers made breads and created shapes like alligators, stars, bears, turtles, etc from the classic sourdough. After years of being away I finally was able to check it out. The bread bowl with classic clam chowder is now $ 13 but I guess I can live with that. But it was exactly like I remember it. Chowder not to salty just right and the bread was delicious. It was heaven! To top it off, my kids got the dungeon uses crab with Mac and cheese. (I’m so proud) and of course we hit up the store down stairs for mini turtle shaped sourdough and Dutch crunch rolls (another bay fave). It was a great experience… Love this place. And our server was soooo nice!

I’m a big fan of Boudin, but I have to honestly say that the museum is just some exhibits and the tour is just a mezzanine that overlooks the bakery. This is an interesting stop, but not worth the $ 3 admission. If you’ve dropped a bunch of dough (no pun intended) in Boudin Bistro then I definitely recommend negotiating a $ 3 discount on admission. On this visit I didn’t check out the exhibits (since I had done so on a previous visit) but I did enjoy watching the bakers at work for about 20 minutes.