If you grew up in the Bay Area, Dutch crunch is just bread. You don't think about it. You order your turkey sandwich, they slap it on that crackly, tiger-striped roll, and life is good. But ask anyone outside a 50-mile radius of San Francisco what Dutch crunch is and you'll get a blank stare.

That's what makes Andrew McCormack a little obsessive in the best possible way.

The chef behind Early to Rise has spent serious time trying to reverse-engineer what most SF bakeries treat as a trade secret — that signature rice flour paste that bakes into the bread's iconic crunchy, leopard-spotted crust. While most people are content to just enjoy the thing, McCormack wanted to understand it.

And honestly? We respect the insanity.

Dutch crunch has always been a quietly San Francisco thing — the kind of hyper-local food culture that doesn't need a PR campaign because it just is. It's on the menu at your corner deli, it's at the ballpark, it's in your childhood lunch. It never needed to be trendy because it was already perfect.

What McCormack seems to get — and what a lot of food culture in this city has forgotten in the age of $22 avocado toast — is that the best things aren't always the loudest. Sometimes genius is a bread roll that's been sitting quietly in a glass case at a sandwich counter for 40 years while everyone walked past it without a second thought.

San Francisco has a habit of exporting its culture to the rest of the world — sourdough, Mission burritos, the whole thing — and Dutch crunch has somehow slipped through the cracks. Maybe that's fine. Maybe it stays ours.

Or maybe someone hands McCormack's recipe to a chain bakery in Columbus and we all hate ourselves for it.

For now, go find a proper Dutch crunch roll. Don't overthink it. Just eat the bread.