Instructions: Bread was my single biggest disappointment when I first set foot in the United States some 50 years ago. Post-World War II Europeans saw America as the land of milk and honey. Well, there was nothing wrong with the milk and the honey, but the bread was another story.

In my Midwestern college days, the choice was between white and so-called whole wheat (almost indistinguishable from white except for a less appetizing muddy color).

Things improved when I eventually ended up in San Francisco. Here, at least, there was the alternative of sourdough French bread - crusty, chewable and with flavor and an aroma that said "bread" rather than "industrial byproduct."

There wasnt much in the way of sandwich bread, though, except for the occasional neighborhood bakery that turned out an acceptable if undistinguished Pullman loaf.

Then came the 70s: antiwar protests, Flower Power, Earth consciousness, food conspiracies and a turning away from anything produced by corporate America. A lot of people - especially those who had not yet reached the despicable age of 30 - started baking their own bread, with whole grains, molasses, honey and home-brewed starters. Most of it was awful.

But those trial efforts paved the way. In the 1980s, it suddenly seemed like some wild yeast had descended on the Bay Area, giving rise to a bread revolution. Almost overnight, a bevy of bakers started crafting European-style loaves, and wonderful bread became an alternative to Wonderbread.

Suddenly, the buzz among restaurant goers and discriminating shoppers was all about bread. Baguette, until then a rather rarefied term, became as commonplace as doughnut. Batarde, panini, ciabatta, pain de mie, focaccia, brioche and pugliese established themselves in our bread baskets.

There may be as many reasons quoted for this sea change in baking as there are practitioners of the craft (65 microbakeries in the Bay Area alone, according to industry sources, and that doesnt include in-store bakeries at such markets as Whole Foods and Andronicos).

Steve Sullivan, co-founder of high-profile Acme Bread Co. in Berkeley, believes that consumers will always choose the best from what they are offered.

In the dark ages of American bread, the mid-20th century, when mass-produced, packaged bread ruled the roost, Americans used bread for sopping up gravy and as a wrapper for equally mass-produced lunch meats, he says. The bread readily available was adequate for those purposes.

With Californians in unprecedented numbers having traveled to Europe, where they feasted on traditional breads, the time was ripe for giving them similar choices on their home turf.

Sullivan, who started as a bus boy at Chez Panisse in 1973, the same year he enrolled at UC Berkeley, eventually became the restaurants baker and, in 1983, cofounded Acme, specializing in crisp-crusted baguettes and other European-style breads.

His baking confrere, Glenn Mitchell, and Mitchells wife, Cynthia, started Grace Baking Co. at Market Hall in Oaklands Rockridge district in 1987, right after the Wall Street Journal wrote that smart money would open a bakery now. The couple proved the venerable financial sheet correct. Grace, now operating from a huge state-of-the-art, highly mechanized facility in Richmond, has become the Bay Area market leader in terms of production and range of distribution. Alone among local artisanal bakeries, Grace has expanded to stores as far away as Alaska and Montana. To give far-flung customers freshly baked bread, Grace employs a prebake method in which not-quite-finished bread is pulled from the oven, frozen, shipped and then "baked off" at the point of sale.

Other bakers, without criticizing Grace, wont go this route, preferring methods that hark back to hundreds of years of European and colonial American baking practices. Many of them let round loaves rise in baskets, as is traditional in France. One of the few nods to modern technology is a certain amount of climate control. Starters are often kept in refrigerators, and measures are taken to counteract huge swings in temperature and humidity, which can wreak havoc on yeast doughs, with dry air the worst enemy.

"Every night at 3 a.m. we check the National Weather Service," says Mike Rose of Semifreddis. Adjustments are made to pamper the dough which, as Rose points out, is a living thing until its slid into the oven.

Semifreddis is a family affair. Tom Frainier, a refugee from the corporate world, owns the company, with his sister Barbara and her husband, Michael Rose.

Together the threesome has taken the bakery from its 1984 beginnings in a barely 500-square-foot storefront in Kensington to its current nearly 20,000- square-foot plant in Emeryville.

Except for size, little has changed. "We have no investors," says Frainier, "so we can do things on our terms." Those terms embrace old-fashioned, largely manual production methods and a business philosophy that includes profit sharing and cash bonuses for employees.

The owners take a purist approach to bread making, using just flour, water, yeast and salt, except in a few special items like challah.

"We dont put things like cheese in our bread," says Frainier, in keeping with his opinion that bread should complement food, not be the whole show. Frainier and Rose credit pioneers in other food-related enterprises with reawakening consumers appreciation of all sorts of honest, real food, including bread - people like Robert Mondavi (wine), Alfred Peet (coffee) and Fritz Maytag (beer).

When pressed, they will name Acme as their closest competitor (the companies both operate in the $7 million to $8 million annual range), but its a respectful and friendly competition, they say.

The mutual respect among these bakers is particularly noteworthy since this is what Semifreddis Rose calls the most competitive food area in the world. Then again, there are many connections among these bakers. Semifreddis was founded in 1983 by Eric and Carol Sartenaer (now owners of Phoenix Pastificio pasta shop and cafe in Berkeley). They had worked at Berkeleys Cheese Board collective, one of the pioneers of the artisan bread movement. The Sartenaers sold Semifreddis in 1987 to two employees, one of whom was Barbara Frainier Rose.

Grace Baking was the proving ground for the Ponsford siblings, Craig and Elizabeth, who went on to open Sonomas acclaimed Artisan Bakers in 92.

The Ponsfords have a strong French orientation, bringing in consulting bakers from France every so often. (In a nice twist, Craig and his breads won the World Cup of Baking competition in Paris in 1996 and he coached the gold medal-winning U.S. team in 99.)

Elizabeth Ponsford finds no surprise in the fact that artisan breads thrive in Northern California. Californians, she says, are the most educated in the country when it comes to eating. "They are used to the highest quality food across the board."

Which means that they think locally baked fresh batarde, pugliese, baguettes and ciabatta are the greatest thing, well, since sliced bread.

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