Chad Robertson

Chad Robertson is an American baker and author who, with his wife Elisabeth Prueitt, founded Tartine Bakery in San Francisco and ignited the modern sourdough revival.

Chad Robertson trained as a baker in France and the United States before opening Tartine Bakery with his wife Elisabeth Prueitt in San Francisco’s Mission District in 2002. The bakery became one of the most celebrated in America — known particularly for its country bread, a naturally leavened loaf with a crackling crust and open, irregular crumb, sold in small quantities each afternoon to lines that regularly extended around the block.

Tartine Bread (2010) was his attempt to document the method — the wild yeast starter, the high hydration dough, the long cool fermentation, the Dutch oven baking — in enough detail that serious home bakers could replicate it. The book succeeded beyond his expectations. It arrived at a moment of growing interest in artisan bread and gave that interest a rigorous technical foundation, triggering the sourdough revival that reshaped home baking across the English-speaking world.

His subsequent books — Tartine Book No. 3 (2013), on whole-grain and alternative-grain baking, and Tartine All Day (2017), on everyday home cooking — have extended his reach beyond bread. But Tartine Bread remains his defining contribution: the book that showed home bakers what was possible and gave them the tools to achieve it.