Sam Whitaker · July 24, 2026
No recipe card has ever warned you about this: what happens to your starter jar sitting on the counter while you’re on a plane, in a rental car, or three time zones away from your kitchen. My own introduction to this gap in the instructions came on a two-week trip early on, when I came … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 16, 2026
A cold snap rolled through my kitchen one February, dropping the room to something like 60 degrees for the better part of a week, and that’s the exact stretch of time I let slip by without checking on Harold, my starter. Three weeks passed before I finally lifted the lid, and what greeted me looked … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 11, 2026
That back corner of my counter, right next to the old proofing box I built during my microbakery years, is where Harold’s jar has lived for as long as I can remember. My husband wandered past one morning, leaned down out of habit for a whiff, and snapped his head back like he’d just inhaled … Read more
Sam Whitaker · May 4, 2026
Last winter, my sourdough starter turned into a sluggish, barely-bubbling mess. I live in a drafty older home, and my kitchen sits at around 64°F from November through March. No matter what I tried — longer bulk ferments, more frequent…
Sam Whitaker · April 20, 2026
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…
Sam Whitaker · January 27, 2026
150% hydration — that’s the real number hiding behind the disaster I’m about to confess to. Picture this: I’d just told my husband that Harold, my starter, had finally “hit his stride,” and about ten seconds later I tipped the jar and watched half its contents slide down the front of my pajamas. The stuff … Read more
Sam Whitaker · January 25, 2026
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
Sam Whitaker · January 24, 2026
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
Sam Whitaker · January 23, 2026
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
Sam Whitaker · January 21, 2026
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
