James Whitmore 
Two years ago, my sourdough loaves were a mess. Every single bake felt like a gamble. I was using measuring cups, eyeballing flour, and wondering why my results were so wildly inconsistent. Then a baker in my local bread group…
My sourdough loaves were stuck in a rut. Every weekend I’d pull a boule out of the Dutch oven, and every weekend the ear was either nonexistent or completely blown out on the wrong side. My old single-blade lame —…
For the longest time, I baked sourdough by feel. I knocked on the bottom of the loaf, listened for that hollow thump, and hoped for the best. Sometimes it worked. Often, I sliced into a loaf that looked perfect on…
I had killed three sourdough starters in two months. Three. Each time, I followed guides, watched videos, and still ended up with a sad, flat jar of flour and water that smelled more like nail polish remover than bread. So…
My sourdough starter turned 11 years old this spring. In that time, I’ve neglected it, overfed it, underfed it, accidentally frozen it, left it in the fridge for a month, and once knocked the jar off the counter and watched…
The first time I added fruit to sourdough, I threw a handful of fresh blueberries into the dough during bulk fermentation. The result was a loaf with purple streaks, soggy pockets where berries had burst, and a crumb so wet…
Shaping was the skill that took me the longest to learn. I could manage fermentation, I could score, I could bake — but for the first year, every loaf came out of the oven looking like it had given up…
I didn’t start baking sourdough because I thought it was healthy. I started because I wanted good bread. But after 11 years — including three years running a home microbakery where I was producing 40 to 60 loaves a week…
For the first two years I baked sourdough, I only baked on weekends. That was the conventional wisdom — start your levain Friday night, mix Saturday morning, bake Saturday afternoon or Sunday. Clean, contained, no pressure. And honestly, it works…
For the first two years I baked sourdough seriously, every loaf I cut open looked the same: a tight, uniform crumb that tasted fine but told me nothing had really worked. I was following the right hydration numbers, using the…
