By Linda Badger

Valeriya Romashchenko opened Cuprum Bakery in 2024, offering sourdough and other baked goods produced in her home kitchen in the Inner Richmond. The popularity of Romashchenko’s cottage bakery, like her sourdough bread, is rising in the Richmond District and beyond.

Romashchenko first started baking in her native Russia at the age of 12. As a child, she loved a traditional Russian Easter Bread called Kulich, but hated raisins, so decided to make her own version. With the help of her grandmother, Romashchenko mastered this recipe and many others. After moving to the U.S., she honed her skills by earning a degree from the San Francisco Baking Institute, a culinary school specializing in artisan breads and pastries.

“The name Cuprum comes from the chemistry table, meaning copper in Latin – my favorite metal,” she said. A scientist at heart, she believes that her “curiosity, always seeking more information and designing experiments to see what works,” are key to her success as a baker.

Romashchenko moved to San Francisco in 2016 after graduating from Moscow State University (“Russia’s MIT”) with a degree in bioengineering. Her initial plan was to find a job in the tech industry, but the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the stark realities of maternity leave in the United States, caused her to seek a flexible option that would allow her to work from home and care for her young daughter.

“Baking had always been a super expensive hobby for me,” Romashchenko said. She decided to apply her considerable skills and energy to, “finally make it pay off.”

In November 2023, Romashchenko completed all the paperwork necessary to open a “micro” or “cottage” bakery from her home in the Inner Richmond. Cuprum Bakery was up and running by April 2024.

In 2013, California’s Cottage Food Law was implemented, allowing individuals to sell nonperishable low-risk foods prepared in their homes according to a set of strict standards to ensure sanitary conditions. To operate Cuprum as a cottage bakery, Romashchenko had to meet all State and local requirements mandated by the California Department of Public Health and the San Francisco Department of Environmental Health. For example, she was required to obtain a food handler certificate and to submit her recipes for approval to make certain that all ingredients are nonperishable.

“When people see that something comes from a home kitchen, they don’t trust it,” Romashchenko said. “But, the same health inspectors come as for commercial kitchens and the same people working in home kitchens can work in commercial kitchens.” She also noted that, “professional home bakers value and treasure the opportunity to sell from home, leading us to be very serious about health protocols – sanitizing surfaces before work, keeping everything neat and tidy and operating during work hours when the house is empty and free from domestic/household activities.”

After opening Cuprum, Romashchenko met the additional requirements for a Class B license in 2025, allowing her to sell her bread to restaurants as well as directly to the public. This type of license requires that public health inspectors visit her kitchen every year.

Customers can buy Cuprum’s sourdough, jalapeno-cheddar bread, toffee almond oatmeal cookies and other treats, directly from Romashchenko as well as from local farmer’s markets.

“I have a very good sourdough baguette – it is what we lack in the neighborhood bakeries,” she said. She also sells Borodinsky Russian Rye Bread to Dacha Kitchen & Bar, a contemporary Eastern European restaurant located in Lower Nob Hill, which features this Cuprum specialty on its menu.

Borodinsky bread is perhaps the most storied of Russian breads. It is a very dark sourdough rye bread sweetened by molasses and sprinkled with coriander seeds. Romashchenko experimented with her recipe for Borodinsky for six months. She started with a standard Soviet recipe she found online.

In 1934, during the industrialization period in the the Soviet Union, the government created standard recipes, called “GOST recipes,” to be replicated in all state-owned factories. These recipes were excellent and highly prized, but involved measurements and ingredients ill-suited to a small bakery in the U.S.

“I thrive in numbers,” Romashchenko said, and easily transformed the industrial-sized recipe to suit her needs. She tweaked the recipe to include locally sourced ingredients and was able to find a fermented rye malt online, which she needed to create the traditional flavor she remembered from home.

Romashchenko noted that Borodinsky bread may have originated in a Russian monastery in the 19th Century. Others believe that the bread was named after the bloody Battle of Borodino, which took place outside of Moscow in 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia. Many soldiers were killed in the village of Borodino, including a Russian general, Alexander Tuchkov, whose widow, Margarita, later established a convent on the battlefield. Legend has it that as a gesture of mourning, the convent nuns baked a dark, almost black rye bread, topped with coriander seeds to represent the grapeshot used in cannons.

“There is something sacred about baking bread; something archaic” Romashchenko said. “Everyone should make their own bread.”

She is especially passionate about sourdough. She describes sourdough starters (used instead of yeast to leaven bread) as “very personal.” Each starter differs a bit depending on the person who maintains it, their home environment and climate. She has nursed her sourdough starter for over a year, and says, “It is now a beast.” According to Romashchenko, San Francisco, and particularly the Richmond District, helps create a successful sourdough by providing a stable climate.

Given its long fermentation time, sourdough is often considered healthier than conventional white breads made with commercial yeast.

“The gluten is more ‘processed’ by natural, wild yeast, making it easier to digest,” Romashchenko stated. Sourdough is also thought to contain fewer hard to digest carbohydrates. Romashchenko, however, gives little credence to the belief that European bread is more digestible than American bread. European “soft wheat” contains less gluten, but Europeans often supplement it with imported hard wheat to improve the texture of their bread.

A big fan of Octoberfest in Munich, Romaschenko learned to make pretzels.

“People are crazy over my sourdough pretzels,” noted Romashchenko. “I once made 48 pretzels, and they were gone in 40 minutes.” She makes pretzels “chubby,” with salt or everything bagel seasoning so that people can slice them like bagels to make sandwiches.

One stormy day at the Sunset Farmer’s Market, Romashchenko recalls desperately trying to keep her tent from flying away as rain threatened to ruin all the baked goods she had worked so hard to produce. Not many customers had braved the storm, and she was disappointed, stressed, and drenched. Giving up, she packed up and went back to her car, when one of her best customers came running up saying that she came to the market because she simply had to have some of Romashchenkos pretzels. She had not sold much that day but was happy.

“It’s such an exceptional experience when someone lights up because they know how uniquely good your product is,” she said. “Support your local sourdough dealer,” she quipped.

One of Romashchenkos ambitions is to attend the German Bread Academy in Weinheim, Germany, to become a certified bread sommelier so that she can conduct bread tastings and teach people how to pair bread with food, wine and beer.

“There are only three bread sommeliers in the U.S.,” she said, “it’s something I’d like to do in the future when I’m done with raising my family.”

In the meantime, Romashchenko wants to stay small and hopes to open her own retail bakery in the neighborhood. “I want to take time to think about it and come up with something really special,” she said. Whatever that might be, it is sure to enrich her fans in the Richmond District.

To check out and pre-order Cuprum’s baked goods, visit its online storefront at Hotplate, hotplate.com/cuprumbakery. You can pick up your order at Romashchenko’s home on Ninth Avenue.

You can also buy her products at the VA Farmer’s Market every Wednesday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. at Veterans Dr., near Clement Street and 42nd Avenue.

To learn more about selling food from home, visit sf.gov/step-by-step–sell-food-you-make-home.