I’ll never forget the Tuesday morning I found my sourdough starter container shattered across my kitchen floor. It was 6 a.m., and I was reaching into the cabinet above my stove to grab what I thought was a sturdy glass jar. Instead, a thin-walled mason jar came tumbling down, exploding on impact and sending two … Read more
There I was, standing in my kitchen at 11 PM on a Friday night, staring at a beautiful, perfectly fermented sourdough round that absolutely refused to fit into my banneton. Not just refused. It was physically impossible. The dough was doming up out of my “professional-grade” proofing basket like a mini volcano, with about two … Read more
I’ll never forget the morning I pulled my sourdough out of the oven and watched it collapse like a sad pancake. It wasn’t the dough. The fermentation was perfect. The shaping was solid. The problem was sitting right there on my cooling rack: a Dutch oven that couldn’t handle the heat, couldn’t trap steam properly, … Read more
I’ll never forget the morning I pulled my beloved Dutch oven out of the oven to find rust blooming across the bottom like some kind of unwelcome sourdough starter culture. Rust. On my most precious baking tool. My hands actually shook as I stared at it, realizing that eleven years of sourdough baking had somehow … Read more
There I was, at 6 AM on a Tuesday morning, staring at 30 balls of cold dough and absolutely no idea which vessel would actually get the job done. My kitchen looked like a sourdough crime scene. A Dutch oven sat on one counter. A shiny new Challenger Bread Pan sat on another. And me? … Read more
