For those of us who don’t live within a few blocks of 18th Street and Guerrero, buying a loaf of Tartine Bakery’s bread is nothing less than a pilgrimage: Given the cruddy parking and the lines, not to mention the fact that the breads are sold only between 5 p.m. and 5 minutes before you get there, they require tactical planning and, ideally, a phoned-in reservation. And yet, when the pilgrimage reaches its end, crusty loaf warming your hand, the effort always seems worth it.

Five years ago, Tartine bread was singular. Now it is a movement. Just as the 1970s gave rise to the doorstop whole-wheat loaf, and the 1980s to shattering, golden baguettes, the 2010s belong to the long-fermented country loaf.

It’s now possible to walk into Bi-Rite or Rainbow Grocery and buy 2-pound loaves of craggy-edged bread with a custardy crumb tinged the color of a plank of walnut by the presence of whole-wheat flour. You can find similar loaves at Pizzaiolo in Oakland and M.H. Bread & Butter in San Anselmo. They will be served with your dinner at Aster or the Perennial. All share the same elemental, cabin-in-the-pines allure of a reclaimed-wood table or an Edison bulb, so classic-looking you ache to brush their crumbs from your waxed-canvas smock.

Tartine’s owner, Chad Robertson, has nothing to do with any of these new breads. Nor, with the exception of M.H. Bread and Butter owner Nathan Yanko, has he personally trained the bakers. Instead, Robertson’s books, 2010’s “Tartine Bread” and 2013’s “Tartine Book No. 3” have done all the work.

The technical characteristics of the Tartine style involve a “high-hydration” dough that is stretched rather than kneaded and that produces architecturally miraculous, moist masses full of large air bubbles. Robertson also uses a freshly innoculated bit of sourdough to leaven the breads, giving them maximum loft but only a soft tanginess.

YouTube videos demonstrating home bakers’ success with Robertson’s techniques are now legion. So are Instagrammed “crumbshots” of thick-walled loaves split in half to expose the interior matrix of bubbles. Tartine lookalikes can be spotted in Seattle (London Plane), Chicago (Publican Quality Meats) and Brooklyn (Brooklyn Bread Lab). In March, Eater conducted a photo survey of breads from New York City’s newest bakeries. Reading it was like scrolling through the pictures of a family reunion, spying the same nose on face after face.

Are they imitators or spiritual children?

I asked Robertson what he thinks. He says he finds the appearance of his culinary heirs all over the world flattering, even when bakers use the same slash marks and add-ins that he described in his books. “When you put everything in a book,” he says, “and we put everything in there — it’s not like we left out a few secrets — in a way, it was a deliberate exercise in pushing myself and my team into the future.”

Tartine’s influence

The influence of the books has been both inspirational and direct. In Buffalo, N.Y., for instance, a young home baker named Allison Ewing followed the now-famous 38-page master recipe in “Tartine Bread” and was enthralled by what she pulled from her oven. “It’s the book that got me hooked on sourdough baking,” she says. It took Ewing years of studying other books and attending seminars to master commercial production, but at BreadHive, the 2-year-old collectively owned bakery that she helped found, domed loaves of naturally leavened hearth breads now appear at farmers’ markets alongside pretzels, bagels and sandwich loaves.

A few years ago, in Charleston, S.C., a McCrady’s pastry chef named Sean Ehland got caught up in Robertson’s books, too. “I wanted to make bread like that,” he says. “I wanted to taste bread like that.” McCrady’s didn’t have the space to let him develop a bread program, so he practiced baking on his own.

Ehland moved to San Francisco two years ago to become the pastry chef at Aster. While waiting for Brett Cooper’s Mission restaurant to open, he worked at Marla Bakery in the Richmond District, learning to bake baguettes, rye breads and ciabattas. When it came time to create a signature bread for Aster, however, Ehland returned to the airy, lightly sour, grain-forward style that first sparked what he calls “the bread insanity.”

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Davey Surcamp, owner of the 6-month-old Pain Bakery, also taught himself from books to bake the round, diamond-slashed loaves he now sells at Bi-Rite, Rainbow Grocery, Market on Market and other grocery stores. Long before he moved to the Bay Area from Oregon, the 30-year-old built his own wood-fired brick oven. Surcamp founded Pizzaiolo’s bread program four years ago after owner Charlie Hallowell allowed a then-itinerant baker named Josey Baker to use his wood-fired oven and realized Pizzaiolo should make its own (Tartine-esque) country breads.

In September 2015, Surcamp left Pizzaiolo, turning the bread production over to Peter Hughes, and set up shop in KitchenTown in San Mateo. His crew currently bakes 160 loaves every day, delivering six varieties — original, sesame, olive, walnut, porridge and whole-wheat — to stores.

The soft-spoken baker stiffens a little when I tell him that I first saw his breads at a local market and thought, ‘Finally! Another spot to get Tartine bread.’”

“Maybe aesthetically there’s something similar, but there’s a je ne sais quoi about ours,” Surcamp said. “Our goal is to get closer and closer to what we conceptualize as our ideal loaf. That fantasy, what we’re striving for, is a little different from what Tartine is.”

Whole grains

Robertson’s most recent book came out just as interest was spiking in local heirloom wheats and ancient grains, many of which lack the right gluten to produce high and delicate-crumbed breads on their own. “Tartine Book No. 3” suggested ways of folding in grain porridges, or blending small amounts of alternate flours, to capture their flavor without sacrificing texture.

That was why Nicola Carey, Perennial’s pastry chef, turned to Tartine’s methods when she was given the task of making bread with kernza, a perennial wheatgrass that owners Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz wanted to use. “It has a grassy, intense flavor and can make the loaf very dense,” she says. “It’s not what people want when they eat out.” It took her months of tweaking percentages to come up with a crusty, bubbly loaf that tastes a little like unvarnished wood or roasted nutshells (in a good way).

Local grains have become the stylistic flourish for Pain, too. Surcamp partnered with Capay Mills, a fledgling operation that produces flour from grains grown on small farms in California and Oregon.

The promised je ne sais quoi does, in fact, emerge the moment you slice into his thick-crusted breads: They’re darker, earthier, with more tang to the crumb. (“It should taste like you’re eating a moist, cheesy rain cloud,” Surcamp says.) Surcamp’s 100 percent whole-wheat loaf, baked with triticale flour from Riverdog Farm in Yolo County’s Capay Valley, may be one of the most appealing whole-grain breads I have yet tasted, with all the distinctive flavor of the kernel but none of the grit and glue of the 1970s generation.

There’s another, logistical reason bakers have taken to Tartine-style breads: the ultra-long rising times. When Robertson wrote that he organized his baking schedule so he could surf in the morning, says BreadHive’s Ewing, she became convinced that she could become a professional baker without working overnight to knead and proof dough. Her days, like the bakers at Pain, now start at 5 a.m.

The schedule particularly suits restaurant pastry chefs. Aster’s Ehland bakes small batches of bread in the restaurant’s only oven just a few hours before the line cooks arrive. His breads come out as precise and uniform as you’d expect of a pastry chef, with a thin, dark crust and a lacy interior that’s still cohesive enough to catch all the butter you spread across it (hint: a lot).

Would all these Tartine-esque country breads be considered copycats? I ask Peter Reinhart, one of the foremost bread-baking teachers in the country. He demurs. The baking community is generous with its recipes and methods, he says. There are no real secrets in baking. “It’s more about execution than it is about formula.”

Chad Robertson says he loves seeing where young bakers are taking the methods his books popularized. At the same time, as they surge forward, he’s not going to be left behind. Tartine is currently building out a new production space in the Heath Ceramics factory in San Francisco. The Manufactory, as they’re calling it, holds a car-size grain mill and enough oven capacity to quadruple its production. He wants to keep changing it up.

A few hours after we hang up Robertson shoots me a note, just to emphasize the point. “We’re just getting started,” he writes.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman