Sam Whitaker

Sam Whitaker has been baking sourdough for over a decade from a home kitchen in the Pacific Northwest. Sam's four-year-old starter, Harold, is the foundation for every recipe and troubleshooting guide on Sourdough Rising — no commercial ovens or professional training, just real bread tested over and over until it works.

Why Does My Starter Smell Like Acetone, Cheese, or Nail Polish? I Investigated So You Don’t Have To

· January 25, 2026
Why Does My Starter Smell Like Acetone, Cheese, or Nail Polish? I Investigated So You Don't Have To

Why does your starter suddenly smell like acetone, and does that mean it’s dead? No — that sharp, nail-polish-remover scent is almost always fixable, not fatal, and I learned that lesson while hovering over Harold’s jar, one hand fanning the fumes away from my face, the other frantically typing “my sourdough starter smells like acetone” … Read more

Reviving a Dead Starter: How I Brought Mine Back After 4 Months in the Fridge

· January 24, 2026
Reviving a Dead Starter: How I Brought Mine Back After 4 Months in the Fridge

Reaching into the back of the fridge one Sunday afternoon for leftover pasta, my hand landed on a mason jar I didn’t immediately recognize — shoved behind the mustard and a block of cheese that had seen better days, topped with a layer of gray-brown liquid like something out of a ghost story. That was … Read more

Baking Sourdough in a Cold Kitchen: The Winter That Nearly Broke Me (and My Starter)

· January 23, 2026
Baking Sourdough in a Cold Kitchen: The Winter That Nearly Broke Me (and My Starter)

Scroll through enough sourdough forums and you’ll run into two flatly opposite pieces of advice about a stalled starter in winter: one crowd insists you just need to wait it out because sourdough always sorts itself out eventually, and the other tells you to feed more often to force activity. The first one is just … Read more

Sourdough Starter Won’t Rise: My 3-Week Diagnosis Diary (And What Finally Fixed It)

· January 21, 2026
Sourdough Starter Won't Rise: My 3-Week Diagnosis Diary (And What Finally Fixed It)

A brutal cold snap had locked onto my kitchen that January, and by day fourteen it had quietly exposed the real problem. The jar sitting on my counter looked like slightly lumpy paste — no bubbles, no dome, nothing that resembled life. Sourdough starter won’t rise, I typed into Google for what had to be … Read more

Mold vs Kahm Yeast on My Starter: The Panic-Inducing Morning That Taught Me Everything

· January 20, 2026
Mold vs Kahm Yeast on My Starter: The Panic-Inducing Morning That Taught Me Everything

No recipe card, no starter guide, no baking book ever prepares you for the exact moment you lift the lid and discover something growing on your starter that absolutely was not there the day before. They’ll spell out feeding ratios and rise windows down to the hour, but nobody warns you what to do at … Read more

Is Sourdough Hooch Actually a Problem? A Quick FAQ

· January 19, 2026
What Is Hooch? Why Your Starter Separates and Whether You Should Actually Worry

The lid barely cracked open before that sharp, boozy tang hit me — sitting right on top of my starter was a thin layer of grayish liquid I hadn’t seen before, pooled like something had gone wrong overnight. This was a starter I’d been babying for three months, and my brain immediately jumped to worst-case … Read more

Sourdough for Gut Health: How the Probiotics and Prebiotics in Real Bread Support Your Microbiome

· January 17, 2026
Sourdough for Gut Health: How the Probiotics and Prebiotics in Real Bread Support Your Microbiome

Nearly every home baker I know treats sourdough like a probiotic you can slice — the working theory being that all those live cultures bubbling away in your starter survive the oven and march straight into your gut. That assumption falls apart under any real scrutiny, and figuring out why turned into one of the … Read more

The Nutritional Profile of Sourdough: More Vitamins, Better Minerals, Less Antinutrients

· January 16, 2026
The Nutritional Profile of Sourdough: More Vitamins, Better Minerals, Less Antinutrients

My old Rofco B40 sits on a scarred butcher-block counter under the kitchen window, and it was there, one night with flour still ground into the creases of my knuckles, that sourdough nutritional benefits vitamins minerals stopped being an abstract phrase to me. I’d been reading up on the subject and had to physically close … Read more