The family bakery was founded by the late Ambrose Galli, and the business was known for using recipes that were passed down generation by generation, especially Italian custards and cakes - but it’s the special bread they experimented with in the 1960s that they would become famous for.Īmbrose’s grandson Todd Galli, who owned the bakery when it shut down in 2016, remembers a family friend who traveled a lot for work would always stop by when he was in the Bay Area to spend time with the family. Most Bay Area bakeries I spoke with believe it started to gain popularity in the Bay Area at Galli's Sanitary Bakery, a now-defunct bakeshop that opened in 1909 and was in operation for 107 years in South San Francisco. supermarket chain Sainsbury's to suggest a renaming. they sometimes call it “giraffe bread” after a 3-year-old wrote to U.K. It's often known under the tiger bread moniker overseas, though in the U.K. Called tiger bread (tijgerbrood), the bakery that mentions the bread had been operating since 1903, which suggests it may go back as far as then.
Peters, also the author of San Francisco: A Food Biography, posits the bread still originated in the Netherlands, though the first published reference she could find in the country was in 1973. Children who will only eat white bread and mothers who want something different can compromise with a loaf of it. The switch to a rice flour wash appears to have happened around the early 1970s, with a San Francisco Examiner article describing it as “a plain white bread with a crunchy top crust that has been covered with a mixture of rice flour, sugar, oil, salt, yeast and water. It turns out early iterations of the bread got that crunchy topping from sesame seeds instead of the rice flour mixture that's omnipresent today.
… It’s Fun to Lunch on Dutch Crunch!”Īn ad for Dutch crunch in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb. In the San Francisco Examiner in 1946, the bread's first Bay Area appearance, an ad exclaims, “You’ll get the surprise of your life when you first taste thrillingly different new Butter-Nut Dutch Crunch Bread - a real, old-fashioned home-style loaf, with the enticing, taste-tempting flavor of sesame seeds. By 1941, it had made its East Coast debut, according to a Pennsylvania ad that extolled its benefits as a vitamin B1 powerhouse.Īds in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer appeared frequently in the 1940s, one calling it a “new taste thrill,” though it's these early advertisements that show early Dutch crunch loaves were quite different from what we know today. Bakeries from Eugene to Klamath Falls to Bend seemed to be the bread’s biggest fans in the '30s, as advertisements for the bread were found in all those places throughout the decade. Peters, where it appeared in a bakery advertisement. The first published reference to "Dutch crunch" bread was in 1935 in Oregon, according to food historian Erica J. Putting aside the odd name choice, the bread likely indeed originated in the Netherlands, though its first U.S. Its popularity has never caught on across the United States, though it can be found sporadically throughout the Pacific Northwest, and many report that the popular East Coast grocery chain Wegmans sells something similar under the name “Marco Polo” bread. Unlike most regional food favorites, outside of the Bay Area, the phrase “Dutch crunch” usually draws blank stares.
As someone who hails from the city of deep dish pizza, you’ll always find your haters, but when something is as omnipresent as that mottled brown roll, whether you love it or hate it, the food is uniquely steeped in history and nostalgia. While some say it rips up the roof of your mouth, just as many must not care, as the bread is ubiquitous at sandwich shops, delis and even neighborhood Safeways across the Bay Area.īut, I’d argue, most regional cuisine is polarizing. That topping I was sweating over is exactly what makes Dutch crunch so polarizing. While some cracks are there and most San Franciscans would likely applaud my decent first attempt, I have some learning to do. When they emerge from the oven around 27 minutes later, they’ve puffed up and have a beautiful golden brown hue, but I can already tell these are no replacement for my corner deli’s version.
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