James Whitmore 
Soft, bendy sourdough crackers are the single most common complaint I hear, and I made every one of these mistakes myself before I figured them out. Over 11 years of baking — and three years selling crackers out of a home microbakery where a soft batch meant a batch I couldn’t sell — I learned … Read more
If there is one recipe that turned my weekly pile of sourdough discard from a guilt-inducing waste problem into something I actually look forward to, it is crackers. I’ve been baking sourdough for 11 years, including three years running a home microbakery, and during that time I made crackers almost every single week — partly … Read more
I’ll never forget the morning I pulled my beloved Dutch oven out of the oven to find rust blooming across the bottom like some kind of unwelcome sourdough starter culture. Rust. On my most precious baking tool. My hands actually shook as I stared at it, realizing that eleven years of sourdough baking had somehow … Read more
The sourdough loaf sat cooling on my counter, looking absolutely perfect. Golden, crackling crust. That gorgeous ear. But something was wrong. The crumb was dense. Gummy. After eleven years of baking, I should have known better. I’d committed the cardinal sin: I’d borrowed my neighbor’s ceramic Dutch oven for the final bake, and I was … Read more
There I was, at 6 AM on a Tuesday morning, staring at 30 balls of cold dough and absolutely no idea which vessel would actually get the job done. My kitchen looked like a sourdough crime scene. A Dutch oven sat on one counter. A shiny new Challenger Bread Pan sat on another. And me? … Read more
If you’ve ever Googled “why is my sourdough starter not bubbling” at midnight, this sourdough for beginners complete guide is the resource I wish had existed when I started. Four years ago, I killed my first starter twice, produced one truly horrifying dense brick I still refer to as “the incident,” and nearly gave up … Read more
If you have ever burned your forearms lifting a screaming-hot Dutch oven lid while trying to slide a wobbly sourdough loaf from a piece of parchment, you already know why I went looking for a better solution. This silicone bread…
For the longest time, my sourdough mixing routine was a mess. Not the good kind of mess where flour dusts your counter and everything smells like a bakery. The frustrating kind — where a wooden spoon gets hopelessly clogged with…
For the first two years of my sourdough journey, my loaves were flat. Not pancake-flat, but definitely not the dramatic, ear-splitting, Instagram-worthy loaves I kept seeing everywhere. I had decent flour, a healthy starter, and a solid scoring technique. Yet…
For the longest time, my sourdough loaves looked embarrassing on top. The crumb was decent. The flavor was there. But every time I scored the dough, the blade dragged, the cuts blew out sideways, and my carefully shaped boule ended…
