Certain flour-dusted circles have been known* to build altars to Tartine Bakery’s Chad Robertson. They pore over his Tartine Bread and Tartine Book No. 3 with the intensity of medical students studying for their board exams. They rip apart his breads to stare longingly at the air holes and take tiny, meditative bites to gauge the flavors locked within its crumb.

It will be a decade before we’re able to assess the full influence on Robertson’s slow-rising, high-hydration, whole-grain-friendly baking methods on bread in America. Predictions are that it will be significant.

If you will accept recent meals at PizzaHacker, Long Bridge Pizza, Del Popolo and Josey Baker Bread (subject of The Bite column this week) as evidence, Robertson is also responsible for a new style of pizza being introduced to San Francisco.

Jeff Krupman, aka the PizzaHacker, was the first to fall under Robertson’s spell. Five years ago–long before Krupman opened his Bernal Heights restaurant–he was baking pies in his “Franken-Weber” grill in public parks and outside bars.

“I had just decided that I was going to reverse-engineer Tartine’s bread dough, because the pizza I had eaten at Apizza Scholl in Portland tasted so much like it,” Krupman says. He mentioned his new quest to local food photographer Eric Wolfinger, who was shooting pictures for Tartine Bread. “Eric laughed and said, well, you’re in luck because we need recipe testers.”

Studying the drafts of Robertson’s 40-plus-page method introduced Krupman to working with wild yeasts–bakers call these doughs “naturally leavened” to distinguish them from ones that rely on commercial yeast. Tartine also inspired him to incorporate whole-wheat flour in the dough (current ratio: 15 percent).

Krupman’s pizzas evolved as he familiarized himself with the Tartine method and tailored it for his own uses. He also introduced the dough to guys who worked gigs for him: Josey Baker, Rafi Ajl (Baker’s roommate) and Neal DeNardi. (Krupman also trained the staff at Forge Pizza in Oakland and Danville, who still base their pizzas on his recipe.)

Not long after Krupman’s conversion to the Robertson Way, Jon Darsky found himself in Tartine’s kitchens, befriending the staff and watching how they worked with dough. He had quit Flour + Water, where he’d made a name as the Mission restaurant’s resident pizzaiolo, and was having a wood-fired oven installed into a shipping container. In February 2012, his Del Popolo truck would launch.

Darsky says he first became captivated with the idea of working with wild yeasts drinking at Terroir, SoMa’s natural-wine bar. He wanted to find out how to do the same with his Neapolitan-meets-Californian pies.

“I noticed that when I used commercial dry active yeast that the flavor I loved was absent,” he says. “For me to create something that’s really unique— and not necessarily that it has terroir, but that it has certain flavor and textural qualities — it’s going to come from a naturally leavened bread.”

“[Wild] yeasts,” Darsky concludes, “bring out whatever flavors that are in your wheat.” Right now, he primarily uses refined flours, but he’s been plotting about how to introduce more whole-grain flour into the recipe.

Exhibit number 3: Long Bridge Pizza, which quietly opened in Dogpatch five months ago but is holding a grand opening, with expanded menu, in six weeks. The pizza world is minuscule; co-owners Neal DeNardi and Andrew Markoulis both worked for Jeff Krupman, and DeNardi spent two years at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana and put in several shifts at Del Popolo.

During DeNardi’s three years with PizzaHacker, DeNardi bought a copy of Tartine Bread, studying it so closely he still quotes sentences from the book as if reciting scripture. Several months before Long Bridge opened DeNardi began cultivating a Dogpatch-native starter. It’s the basis of all his pies. Like the others, there’s some whole wheat in there, which the pizzaiolo prizes for its earthy character.

Working with naturally leavened doughs is much more complicated than commercial yeasts. “It’s about patience, time, temperature, the smell of your leaven,” DeNardi says. He has to think in 24-hour cycles, prepping for the next service in the middle of the current one, making tiny adjustments to compensate for the atmosphere.

Josey Baker has made no secret of his admiration for Chad Robertson. But as he has evolved from an amateur to a professional and cookbook author, he’s taken his naturally leavened breads in different directions from Tartine’s. The pizza he now serves on Monday nights clearly comes from the same lineage as the other three pizzas, but it’s Josey’s own, too, made with 50 percent whole wheat, dusted with cornmeal and brushed with garlic oil. Like the other three, it is ridiculously tasty.

Just to be clear: This quartet of pizza makers are not the first or only bakers to use naturally leavened doughs. Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana has been cultivating wild yeasts for two decades, and Keith Freilich of Emilia’s Pizza in Berkeley eschews instant yeast as well. Tangy sourdough pizzas, such as the one at Arizmendi, have existed here for years.

But four Tartine-inspired pizzaioli who use naturally leavened, partially whole-grain doughs constitutes more than a trend. Jeff Krupman calls it–and not lightly, given pizza nerds’ obsession with taxonomy–a unique style. Talking to the four of them, even the word “style” proves too restrictive. Let’s call their approach to pizza making, instead, a way of life.