Sam Whitaker · June 24, 2026
Lower hydration doesn’t mean lower quality — it means a dough that actually behaves the way a beginner needs it to while you’re still learning to read fermentation by feel. Why Start With Lower Hydration? High-hydration dough is sticky, hard to shape, and unforgiving of small mistakes. A 65% hydration dough, by contrast, holds its … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 23, 2026
Sourdough bread does not hand your gut a dose of living probiotics — the oven wipes out nearly all of that bacterial activity before the crust even cools. I know that runs against everything the wellness corners of the internet love to repeat, and I believed it too, right up until my sister-in-law casually mentioned … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 22, 2026
Your starter is bubbly. Your kitchen smells incredible. You’ve shaped your first boule at 2 a.m. and you’re genuinely convinced you’ve nailed it. Then you open your Dutch oven at 450°F and find… a pancake. Eleven years later, I’ve learned that flat loaves aren’t a failure—they’re feedback. Over three years running my home microbakery, I … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 20, 2026
Ever pulled a gorgeous, fully-risen sourdough round out of bulk fermentation only to find it flat-out refuses to fit inside your banneton? That exact nightmare hit me at 11 PM on a Friday night, standing in my kitchen wondering how I’d let this happen. And “refuses” is putting it mildly. This was a physical impossibility. … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 19, 2026
Nine years back, on a flat gray Tuesday morning, I hauled a sourdough boule out of the oven and watched it sink into something closer to a hockey puck than a proper loaf. The dough itself wasn’t to blame. Fermentation had gone exactly as planned, and the shaping held up fine. The real culprit was … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 18, 2026
Half the sourdough advice floating around online will tell you a French culture and a San Francisco culture are basically interchangeable — feed either one, bake, done. The other half insists you need a completely separate schedule for each or the loaf just won’t work. The first claim is the one that’s dead wrong, and … 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 15, 2026
No recipe card on the planet warns you that a starter can go from sluggish to volcanic in the space of an evening, or that “double in size” doesn’t come with a manual for what to do when it actually happens at 11 PM on a Tuesday. That’s roughly the scene I found myself in … Read more
Sam Whitaker · June 14, 2026
The lid barely cracked open before the smell hit me — something sharp, almost like vinegar folded into ripe yogurt — and my first thought was, that’s stronger than usual. That was the same starter I’d fed the night before, the one that went into the loaf I served my mother-in-law at dinner a few … 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
