Jean Baptiste Garacochea was sixteen years old when he left the village of Les Aldudes in the French Pyrenees for America. The year was 1899.
Family lore has it that he carried a sourdough starter from his father’s bakery — one the family had been feeding since at least the 1860s — the village records do not go back farther. We tell that story carefully, because it is lore rather than documented fact, and the difference matters.
What is documented
He went first to the Basque community in Tehachapi. By 1908, aged twenty-five, he had founded his own bakery in Santa Monica. Most of his customers wanted plain French white bread. The farmers wanted something else: three- and five-pound sourdough rounds, kept moist under a towel and eaten across the week.
He delivered as far north as Malibu and as far south as San Pedro, selling red wine made from Bakersfield grapes alongside the bread.
The rounds we still bake
The large sourdough round on our stall is the direct descendant of the loaf those farmers wanted. Same shape, same reasoning: a big loaf keeps better than a small one, and a family can eat it all week.
That is not marketing. It is just what the bread was for. People still notice them: the large sourdough miches we bake now and then tend to get spoken for quickly. With modern freezers and packaging, a loaf built to last a week is less of a necessity than it once was — but we will still make one when it is asked for.