How SF's Rize Up Sourdough Puts Black Bakers on the Map

Sourdough from Azikiwee Anderson’s Rize Up Bakery in San Francisco has become one of the most sought-after loaves in the Bay Area. Anderson plays with flavors treasured by immigrant diasporas that call California home. Ingredients like gochujang, ube, curry leaves and sesame are woven into the dough, packing a punch.

“I’m trying my best to take that source material, turn it on its ear and say this is beautiful as well,” he said. “I just am inspired by this flavor profile and I’m giving you a new offering. If you like these things, you might like this too.”

Anderson, 49, always loved bread. He was that person at a restaurant constantly asking for a refill of the bread basket. His favorite spot: Outerlands in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood.

“When I first started [making sourdough], that was like my Holy Grail,” he said. “Like, if I can make bread that’s like that, I would have broken the code.”

During shelter-in-place, when it seemed everyone started baking sourdough, Anderson got to work trying to recreate that loaf. The finicky process of fermenting the sourdough starter to produce the right amount of rise and baking the loaves at the perfect temperature became meditative for Anderson. He found baking helped him process the emotional trauma of the pandemic and incidents of police violence that sparked protests in 2020.

“I didn’t even know I was going to love to do it, until the act of doing it calmed my mind and kinda healed part of my heart,” he said. “The act of actually making sourdough made me happy and so I just did it more and more. And when it made me happy, it made other people happy. I could spend my whole life doing this.”

Months after he started baking sourdough, he started selling loaves out of his backyard in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood. Soon, people lined up for the coveted bread, and Rize Up Bakery was born.

Today, Anderson’s loaves are sold at San Francisco grocery stores including Rainbow Grocery and Gus’s Community Market, and is found on menus at buzzy restaurants including Flour + Water, ABACÁ and The Morris. To match the demand, Anderson moved to a commercial kitchen last fall, hiring a slew of new bakers to build his company.

A racial divide in the baking world

Before the pandemic, Anderson worked in professional kitchens and in private catering. At some of his restaurant jobs, he noticed a racial divide among staff.

“I’m a 6-foot-3 Black guy. You walk into a kitchen and I stand out like a sore thumb,” he said. “There was this weird color line where it’s like all the brown people come in and get everything ready and then all the white folks with tattoos show up and they make twice as much and they’re the ones you see.”

When it came to hiring for his bakery, he wanted to do things a different way. Most of his bakers have no professional experience in kitchens. Many joined after following Anderson on Instagram.

“It’s expensive, because most of the people that I hired didn’t have very much experience, so we’re teaching them from the ground up,” he said. “The people here chose to be here. They weren’t headhunted, they weren’t offered a lot of money. They said ‘I want to do this with you.’”

Susie Breuer worked in the fashion industry for more than 30 years, but right before the pandemic, she decided she wanted a career change.

“I wanted to make something which was compostable and didn’t just land in landfill,” Breuer said. “I’d always enjoyed cooking. I want to work towards a product that nourishes people, that is also better for the planet than a pile of clothes that we don’t need.”

She now handles Rize Up’s recipe development and prepares all the inclusions that go into Anderson’s creative loaves. She chops the scallions and shops for the gochujang that go into the K-Pop loaf. She also sources the curry leaves that go into the Masala loaf.

Rize Up’s ube sourdough loaf is one of their most popular flavors. When Anderson was creating the flavor, it took several iterations to get right. To make sure the flavors were right, he consulted Filipino chefs, like pastry chef Joana Bautista of ABACÁ.

“I had bought one from him and it was still in the testing phase. He asked me how it was and I was like ‘I don’t really get the ube yet. You need more ube,’” Bautista recalled.

Ube has taken off as a popular ingredient found everywhere from expensive bakeries to the Trader Joe’s freezer aisle. But Bautista says ube’s nuanced, earthy flavor often gets flattened by sugar and ends up just tasting sweet.

“I feel like they didn’t do the ingredient justice,” she said. “They jump on the bandwagon but then there’s not really any thought process into how to make it taste authentic or like how a Filipino person would eat it.”

When Bautista tried Rize Up’s ube loaf while it was still being developed, she knew the loaf needed ube halaya, a milk jam made from the tuber that gives ube desserts their iconic flavor. Now, Anderson and his team make ube halaya from scratch, giving the bread a beautiful purple color and a subtle earthy, sweet flavor.

“At the beginning, it [cost] over $20 a loaf to make, because of all the stuff that goes into it and all the times I made it and it didn’t turn out because of all the extra stuff I’m putting into it,” he said.

“If you take a bite out of ube halaya and you take a bite of the ube sourdough, they’re not the same thing. But they’re both beautiful and they show that they come from the Filipino background,” he said. “The key is to not pretend like you made something new but to embrace where it came from.”

Recently, Rize Up’s offerings have expanded outside of bread. Anderson is playing with sourdough to create the best croutons, cookies, biscuits and more by building off the flavors and techniques he’s already working with.

“At the beginning, it was just me, so something else [other than sourdough loaves] wasn’t going to happen,” he said. “And then we got to a certain level where there’s opportunity.”

As someone who has experienced housing insecurity himself, Anderson knew exactly how he wanted to give back to the San Francisco residents who can’t afford his $15 loaves. Last December, Rize Up started offering a “pay-it-forward” loaf, where customers receive a discount if they buy a loaf for themselves and one to donate to a San Francisco food bank.

“I know that we make beautiful bread with really high-end ingredients. And I just thought, instead of people getting junk that’s full of preservatives, I wanted to inspire other people to try to make a difference,” he said.