A Rising Star Chef Trains San Francisco’s Next Generation of Bakers

On an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in March, Azikiwee “Z” Anderson stands in a small kitchen, talking about gluten production.

Here in the back of the Smoke Soul Kitchen soul food restaurant in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, seven teens and almost-teens are huddled in front of a big commercial mixer, listening as their teacher for the day elucidates the finer points of making a kick-ass batch of pizza dough.

Then, one by one, the students pour the ingredients with which they’ve been entrusted into the mixer — water, yeast, “poolish” (or pre-ferment), flour and salt. And as the machine folds the mixture onto itself again and again, slowly but surely, a dough begins to form.

The key, Anderson says, is to allow the “little rubber bands” of gluten to form more and more connections, strengthening the dough and making it more elastic. “Then you can stretch it out and make a pizza,” he says.

By the end of this two-hour session, every kid in the class will have done exactly that. They’ll have flattened and stretched out their dough, spun it in the air like a real Italian pizzaiolo, slathered it with toppings and slid the whole thing into a 550-degree triple-decker oven. They’ll have eaten their fill and brought home another ball of the dough that they made together from scratch, ready to do it all again the next day.

The pizza-making session is part of a series of monthly community baking classes called “Rize + Make” hosted by the Bayview Makers Kitchen, a food incubator run by the nonprofit Economic Development on Third (EDoT). The classes, which started in February, are pegged for youth ages 16-20, with a bit of wiggle room. (Students for this particular session range in age from an 11-year-old attending with her mom to a young man in his early 20s.) Most of them are Bayview residents themselves — a mix of Black, Asian and Latino kids.

The best part? The classes are completely free.

For young foodies who sign up for his class, Anderson is something of a local celebrity — a rising star in the world of artisanal baking. His sourdough bakery, Rize Up Bakery, is one of the breakout hits from the pandemic pop-up era, known for loaves with boundary-pushing flavors like Korean gochujang and Indian masala.

Anderson’s bread is now a staple at Bay Area farmers markets and high-end grocery stores, and he’s about to launch his first cafe, in a space adjacent to his production facility in SoMa.

He’s also highly aware of the space he occupies as one of the only Black bakers in the artisanal sourdough scene in the Bay Area and beyond. It’s a big part of why he thinks it’s so important for him to give back — to give Black and Brown kids in the Bayview a chance to imagine a future they’d never before considered.

“Obviously, you’re here for a reason,” Anderson says at the start of the class. “The next step is how do we build enough skills and how do we have fun, so that you want to be in the kitchen more? And you think, ‘I could be a baker. I could do this.’”

Baking to feel seen

Anderson’s own childhood was, by all accounts, a difficult one. Born and raised in New Orleans, he was the eldest of three children in a biracial family. His father, a traveling musician, was a heroin addict who “spent all his money on drugs and wound up beating my mom close to death,” Anderson recalls.

When his mother got out of the hospital, protective services told her she was going to wind up dead if she didn’t move away; they put her and her kids on a bus to San Francisco. Anderson was 5 years old at the time.

The family lived in the bus station for the first few weeks after they arrived, until a women’s shelter finally set them up with a place to stay. Eventually, they moved into a small apartment amid the housing projects in the Western Addition.

“The only places that we could afford to live were pretty bad,” Anderson says. Still, he fell in love with early-’80s San Francisco from the very start — he loved the diversity of thought and the way all different kinds of people were able to feel included. “At its core, it’s a place where people come to be part of community,” he says.

It was a different story when Anderson moved to Chico in middle school. There, he was often one of the only Black kids in any given room, and his adolescent years were riddled with run-ins with teachers and police.

He felt perpetually pigeonholed and stereotyped. Later, as an adult, Anderson was one of a tiny handful of Black inline skaters successful enough to make a living at it, first as a competitor and then as a judge, event organizer and skatepark designer. And when he finally got involved in the Bay Area’s artisanal sourdough scene, he didn’t know any other Black bakers who were part of that world.

“I never saw anyone who looked like me do that,” he says, explaining his initial skepticism.

All of this helps explain why the idea of teaching a free baking class for young people was so appealing to Anderson. For Black and Brown kids in Bayview, he wants to be that adult role model he never had when he was growing up — the one who opens up the possibility of a career path a kid might have never considered for someone who looks like them.

After all, he says, “I don’t think people were like, ‘Oh, Black people shouldn’t be a part of this.’ I just think maybe we didn’t have the means or the involvement. And so we didn’t see it as something that was viable for us.”

Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Anderson’s own sourdough journey started during the pandemic. By the 2010s, he’d stepped away from rollerblading to spend more time with his children. He’d always loved cooking, so he figured he might make a career out of it. After going to culinary school, he built up a successful career as a private chef.

Of course, that business evaporated once COVID lockdowns hit. Anderson suddenly found himself with a lot more time on his hands, and he joined a group text with friends and neighbors who would share recipes for quarantine meals. It was only a matter of time before a few of them started tinkering with sourdough.

Anderson, for his part, had never baked seriously before, and he recalls his first few loaves being completely mediocre. “I sucked at it,” he says. “And I don’t like sucking at things.”

So he kept baking, expanding his output from one loaf to two loaves to eight loaves a week, documenting his progress on Instagram and masking up to drop the bread off on his neighbors’ doorsteps. Eventually, he got good enough that people as far away as Brooklyn started asking if they could buy a loaf. He built a website, and the rest was history.

That’s one part of the origin story of Rize Up Bakery, anyway. The other part is that Anderson cried every day in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in Minneapolis. “I never thought of myself as a depressed person, but something about him begging and talking to his dead mama just broke my heart. I couldn’t deal with how it made me feel.”

Baking sourdough was the one way he could tune out that pain for a few hours — the one thing that made him feel genuinely happy. “It was very Zen-esque,” he says. “Everything else would disappear.” And when he shared his bread with other people, it would make them happy too.

“It was the coolest feedback loop,” he says, describing the “dopamine hit” he’d get every time someone praised one of his creations.

It was deeply intentional, then, that Anderson made Rize Up’s logo a raised Black fist. And the fact that Anderson comes from such a different background than other people in the artisanal sourdough world has turned out to be his greatest strength.

“I have never been accepted in my life; I know the way it feels to be othered and disrespected,” Anderson says. “How can I use my platform to make other people feel seen?”

That thought process leads him to different flavors than the ones commonly sold at other bakeries — because he isn’t offering, say, a cranberry-walnut loaf just because he knows it will sell. Anderson points to one of his most popular breads, the ube pan loaf, as a point of contrast.

Anyone could have made that bread, he says. The reason Anderson was the one who did was because he’d had Filipino friends who’d invited him into their homes and made him feel like he belonged.

“I’m inspired by people who always made me feel seen. Most people would say, ‘Why would I make this crazy loaf that makes it 10 times harder to make the bread, and I don’t even know if people will buy it?’” he says.

Some of Rize Up’s early experiments drew on his New Orleans roots, incorporating spicy Louisiana sausages, for instance. These days, many of the bakery’s most popular loaves draw from seemingly unlikely global inspirations, like his “K-Pop” bread, which features roasted garlic cloves and a hit of gochujang heat.

“I do everything ass-backwards,” he says. “I make [the bread] to make people feel seen.”

A Bayview revival

In the end, that’s what Anderson hopes his baking class will be too — a way of helping his students feel seen.

Earl Shaddix, executive director of EDoT, explains that the idea of offering a free baking class came out of the organization’s kitchen incubator program, Bayview Makers Kitchen.

As part of the group’s effort to revive Bayview’s Third Street corridor, they came up with the idea of refurbishing shuttered restaurants and turning them into shared kitchen spaces for up-and-coming food entrepreneurs. The first one, at 5698 3rd St., was so successful that the program quickly outgrew the space; two of the incubator’s alumni now run their Mexican restaurant, Frank Grizzly’s, there.

The current iteration of the Bayview Makers Kitchen runs out of the space formerly occupied by Auntie April’s, a classic SF soul food spot that closed during the pandemic.

In front, Smoke Soul Kitchen, another of the incubator’s graduates, is a full-blown soul food restaurant. In the back, the incubator now hosts a handful of bakers — a donut maker, a Palestinian baker, a Filipina pastry chef and more. On Sundays, though, the kitchen was free, and so Shaddix struck on the idea of hosting classes there for neighborhood youth.

“We wanted the instructors to look like the community,” Shaddix says. “Youth in our community are not going to a fancy baking school downtown. That’s not happening. So rather than send our kids down there, let’s bring the big guns out here.”

Anderson was the first person who came to mind.

While the classes aren’t limited to Bayview residents, Shaddix says kids from the neighborhood are given priority, especially since each class tops out at 10 students. So far, he says, the response has been phenomenal, and he’s already making plans for other classes — one on jam-making, perhaps, or maybe one focused on pies and biscuits.

For some of the kids, the series will serve as a direct pipeline into their first summer jobs, bussing tables or working in the prep kitchen at one of Bayview Makers Kitchen’s affiliated restaurants.

‘Become the adult you needed’

Maybe the most surprising thing about this kids’ baking class is how much math and science there is, as Anderson spends a good chunk of the time talking about dough hydration percentages and ideal fermentation temperatures, and teaching how to tare a scale and ever-so-gingerly measure out exactly 40 grams of flour. (One student, 16-year-old Bailey, says the whole thing reminds her of chemistry class.)

Beyond the pizza party of it all — the joy with which each student slides their custom-topped pies off the pizza peel with a quick shoop, and then tears into their pizzas while the crust is still blistering hot — the biggest thing that comes across is how much the class feels like a real job training.

As much as Anderson talks about specific techniques for kneading or shaping the dough, he spends just as much time emphasizing the importance of staying organized in the kitchen, moving efficiently and cleaning up after yourself as you go. By the end of the session, it really does feel like everyone is ready to work a shift at the bakery.

The students, by and large, aren’t sure yet if they would really consider a career as professional bakers, though the class seems to open their eyes up to the possibility.

Eleven-year-old Marina Sanchez, a Bayview resident who’s taking the class along with her mom, says the baking series initially caught their eye because they’d seen Anderson and his bakery featured on TV. Jaylen Banks, who, in his 20s, is the oldest student in the class, has always liked cooking, but says he’s come away from the first two sessions with a greater sense of confidence in his abilities — enough so that he’s now “maybe” interested in exploring it as a career.

Meanwhile, Santino Jolibette, 16, is taking the class as part of an internship at Smoke Soul Kitchen he is doing through EDoT, so he’s already well on his way to exploring cooking and baking as a potential career — “it’s definitely possible,” he says, though for now it’s just a hobby. At home, his parents mostly cook Mexican food, so artisanal sourdough pizza is a whole new world.

Jeanne McCoy, an EDoT board member and the mother of one of Anderson’s baking students, says the class is a clear-cut example of why representation is important.

“If you don’t see a Black astronaut in space, you might think that’s not something for you,” she says. “But if you see somebody that’s from your community who is doing the thing, it helps lay a roadmap. It’s not such a gap between this thing that I might be dreaming about and the person who’s doing it way over there.”

Ultimately, Anderson says what really spurred him to pursue teaching seriously was when one of his employees told him, “When you grow up, you become the adult you needed as a kid.”

“That shook me up,” Anderson says. He recalls that when he was a teenager, he never thought that any of the adults in his life, apart from his mother, cared about cultivating his dreams.

“A lot of the softness that I had got crushed out of me when I was a kid,” he says. “How cool would it be if I could [have kept] the beautiful, soft part of me just because someone believed in me?”

Young people, when they’re 16 or 20 years old, just need someone to help them to imagine a future for themselves, he says — someone who cares enough about them to say, “You’ve got this.”

On his own unlikely journey to becoming a baker, Anderson says, “How was it that I spent my entire life and no one ever told me I could do this — how cool it would be to do this? I want these kids to see it in themselves, too.”

The “Rise + Make” baking classes take place on the fourth Sunday of every month — at least through October for this first year, Anderson says. The next session is on April 26, noon to 2 p.m., at 4618 3rd St., in San Francisco. Pre-registration is required, and space is extremely limited. The classes are free and are recommended for youth ages 16-20, with priority given to Bayview residents.