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 27, 2026
Pull up a photo I could show you this second: a torn-open sourdough boule with a wildly irregular, glassy crumb, sitting right beside an older shot of a flat, deflated slab spreading across the edges of my proofing bowl at five in the morning. That second photo is proof of exactly how badly things can … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 13, 2026
Almost every home baker assumes the same thing about a starter that’s been forgotten: once it’s sat neglected for weeks, it must be dead, and the only real option is to toss it and build a fresh culture. That assumption is wrong more often than it’s right — and I learned this the hard way, … Read more
Sam Whitaker · April 30, 2026
For the longest time, my bulk ferment was a complete guessing game. I was using a random ceramic mixing bowl covered with plastic wrap, and I had absolutely no idea how much my dough had risen. Every bake felt like…
Sam Whitaker · March 19, 2026
Somewhere in my third year of keeping a starter alive, on a quiet Sunday evening, I ended up cross-legged on the kitchen floor, flour dusted down the front of my shirt, actually crying over a loaf of bread. This wasn’t some exaggerated way of putting it — I really did sit down against the cabinet … Read more
Sam Whitaker · March 18, 2026
Scroll through enough sourdough advice online and you’ll find two camps flatly contradicting each other: one tells you to just warm your dough up whenever it’s dragging, the other insists that slowing everything down is the only path to “real” flavor, full stop. The second camp is wrong when you’re actually up against a clock … Read more
Sam Whitaker · March 16, 2026
A sudden humidity spike had rolled through overnight — the kind of muggy, close air that turns an ordinary kitchen into an unpredictable proofing chamber — and by 6:47 that Sunday morning I understood exactly what it had done to my dough. What greeted me on the counter looked less like a loaf-in-waiting and more … Read more
Sam Whitaker · March 15, 2026
No recipe card ever warns you about this part: standing there in your pajamas at 5:47 on a Tuesday, flour dusted across the ceiling for reasons you can’t explain, with exactly 43 minutes before you need to be out the door, and a loaf on the counter that looks stunning and is still raw in … Read more
Sam Whitaker · March 14, 2026
The jar on my counter told the whole story before I even touched the dough: barely a bubble breaking the surface, that flat, dull sheen instead of the domed, frothy cap I’d trained myself to expect. My starter had gone quiet overnight, and I didn’t catch it until I was standing there in mismatched socks … Read more
Sam Whitaker · March 12, 2026
Almost every home baker assumes that any bowl with a lid is good enough for keeping tabs on an overnight bulk ferment, as long as it’s roomy enough for the dough to expand. I held that same belief until a Tuesday night close to midnight, when I found myself in mismatched socks, squinting into an … Read more
