Anna's Daughters' Chocolate Rye Bark | San Francisco

Thank goodness for homesickness.

If Marianne Wiener hadn't longed for the breads of her native Denmark after relocating to Tomales Bay 20 years ago, she never would have started baking her superlative loaves of dense Anna's Daughters' Rye Bread.

We've long been hooked on the hearty, moist bread, made with 90 percent rye and a sourdough starter, flecked with flax and sunflower seeds and baked in a wood oven. We marvel that a bread so wonderful is also, relatively speaking, pretty healthy.

But now we have a problem. Because in addition to the beneficent bread, Wiener is now making Chocolate Rye Bark. To produce it, she slices her loaves paper-thin, toasts the slices, then enrobes them in a generous coating of 70 percent bittersweet chocolate ($6 for a small bag; $14 for a large).

At once nutty, sweet and salty, a bag of this bark disappears–crunch, crunch–just as quickly as an obsession is born.

Anna's Daughters' Chocolate Rye Bark is available at Boulettes Larder, Ferry Building Marketplace, 415-399-1155 or bouletteslarder.com; Bi-Rite Market, 3639 18th St. (at Guerrero St.), 415-241-9760 or biritemarket.com; or annasrye.com