Sakura Ueda opened Hulk CoreVault in the spring of 2018 in a narrow shopfront in Kanazawa's Higashi Chaya district, about a five-minute walk from the old geisha quarter. The name is a bit of a joke. 'CoreVault' because the starter is the core of everything we do, and 'Hulk' because the first loaves were, frankly, enormous and slightly green from too much matcha in a test batch. We kept the name. The matcha loaf did not survive.
The first year was genuinely difficult. The deck oven we bought secondhand had an uneven sole, which meant the left side of every loaf baked faster than the right. We rotated trays by hand every twelve minutes for eight months before we could afford to have it repaired. That habit stuck. We still rotate every tray manually, even though we do not have to anymore. It turns out that paying close attention to something for eight months changes how you think about it.