Tech Up Your Sourdough With These Upper-Crust Baking Gadgets
Sourdough bread is one of the most wonderful things you can make with your hands, but it can be fussy and hard to get consistently right. These three new devices eliminate most of the guesswork. Courtesy of Sourdough Sidekick
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I love making sauerkraut. I've almost always got a batch actively fermenting and another in the fridge, ready to eat. It's a project that can take a week or two, almost entirely hands-off once the veggies are cut and salted. To keep the active batch happy—it likes hanging around between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit—I typically I keep it near the slider by my desk on the shady side of the room, closer to the glass if it needs to be cooler, a little farther away if it's cold out.
Making sourdough bread, however, is a much more complicated process that involves different stages of fermentation that tend to like it hot. When you're starting a new batch of starter—the yeasty mixture that gives the loaf the bubbles to rise and the tang to light up your taste buds—it likes temperatures in the mid to high 70s to low 80s, what's affectionately known as the Goldilocks zone, not too hot and not too cool.
Temperature control is key for the sourdough making process, and a group of new, recent, and forthcoming products that help coddle your starter and dough might just be enough help for people on the edge to become full-fledged sourdough people.
In your home, finding consistently warm-enough spots can be daunting, especially for those of us who are newer or more casual sourdough bakers. While sauerkraut is pretty simple and forgiving, making sourdough is not. It is variables galore as you work to coax flour and water from separate states into a delicious risen loaf. This is particularly noticeable when you're in the week-plus project of creating starter, then keeping it happy for months or years.
The variables of making and maintaining starter include weights of water, one or two kinds of flour, and the starter itself. It involves the temperature of that water and the temperature you store it at. Once you're ready to make a loaf, sourdough bread making is often a two-day process with multiple steps and techniques, wherein temperature control is critical in keeping the dough happy.
A perfect sourdough boule. PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES
Bread making isn't one skill or technique, it's a bunch of them, and each step depends on the success of the ones before it. Somewhere in there, insert a problem, or just a little doubt about what you're doing. Maybe your starter smells funny, or the dough doesn't look like it does in the recipe photo. Then what? Some problems could be the result of the last thing you did or a skipped starter feeding from a week ago or something else entirely. Happy troubleshooting! When you're an amateur or parachuting into it for the first time, failure or at least disappointment is part of the game.
If this both heightens your desire to make sourdough and spikes your anxiety, you'll understand why pegging any variables in the process can help eliminate confusion.
The first product that caught my attention is the Sourdough Sidekick, a collaboration between King Arthur Flour and FirstBuild, GE Appliances' prototyping and product development lab. The countertop device is available for preorder and is due out early in 2026. Keeping starter happy means feeding or 'refreshing' it, which requires you to combine a tiny bit of the existing batch with water and flour to keep the bacteria and yeasts in the mixture happy and well fed. Some experts even recommend doing this twice a day … forever … which is fine if you bake on most days and is way too much if you no longer work from home, are a busy person, or would just rather not be beholden to a little jar of yeasty flour and water on your countertop.
The Sidekick's schtick is that you can program it to prolong the time between your interactions with it as it automates the feeding. It even has a mode where you tell it when you'll be baking and it will make sure that your starter is timed out perfectly for your dough and make a little extra to keep your starter refreshed in perpetuity. (Non-nerds, skip the following sentence: It can even turn your starter into levain for your bread and leave enough at the end to keep the starter rolling.) It also cuts down on waste and time spent cleaning by using tiny doses of flour and water during the refreshments.
The Sourdough Sidekick Courtesy of Sourdough Sidekick
I got a Zoom call walk-through on this from Rick Suel, engineering director at FirstBuild's Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters, and it's easy to see how the Sidekick could make bread making and starter maintaining easier. The machine looks and acts a bit like a fully automatic coffee machine with a flour hopper up top and a water tank in the back. The two ingredients are stirred together in the fermentation vessel, and the amounts are adjusted depending on ambient temperature. It's pretty slick.
Brød & Taylor takes a different tack to achieve a similar effect. Its Sourdough Home ($119) looks like a shoebox-sized countertop fridge and it can hold starter anywhere between 41 and 122 degrees. For me, this meant I could hold my starter at 80 degrees, the recommended temperature in the recipe I used, and keep it there during the 10-plus days of starter creation.
I wasn't finding anything warmer than 77 degrees next to my fridge, so when I was troubleshooting on day six or seven, I stuck it in the freshly arrived Home and didn't have to worry about the temperature being a factor anymore.
The Sourdough Home Courtesy of Brød & Taylor
The Home also has the ability to space out your sourdough refreshments, not by Sidekick-style microdoses but by cooling the temperature of your starter. Fermentation will happen at preferred speeds, but cooling the starter slows the process down, allowing you to refresh less. The first time I tried it at a lower temperature, following two weeks of daily refreshments, I set it to 50 degrees and walked away, sort of stunned to see it bubbly and happy 48 hours later, compared to how spent and flabby it would have been if it was held that long at 80 degrees. It was easy to see how something like this is appealing to both beginner and experienced bread bakers.
Controlling the temperature is also extremely helpful once you start making bread. SourHouse, which came out with the starter-coddling Goldie a few years back, just released the DoughBed ($280), a heated, happy place for dough to rise, if you can afford that hefty price. Sourdough loaves often have two separate fermentation periods. The first, 'bulk fermentation,' is where the dough rises and develops flavors. Later, after a bit of shaping, it proofs in a vessel—often a basket—that helps it rise and ferment a bit more while formed in the shape of the loaf to come.
The DoughBed is a pill-shaped glass bowl that fits over a heating pad and under an insulated cork lid. It helps keep bulk fermentation on track by holding the dough between 75 and 82 degrees. The bowl's long, flat bottom allows for more dough to be as close as possible to the heat. I usually do bulk fermentation in an eight-quart Cambro container, at which point it's either at the mercy of the ambient temperature in my house or I tuck it into that warm spot next to my fridge. I call it ready when it is notably risen and is both a bit smoothed out and bubbly. If you like that readiness on more of a schedule, the DoughBed's consistent temperature helps get the dough where you want it, when you want it. If you are on a schedule, you'll appreciate this predictability.
The DoughBed Courtesy of SourHouse
Of course, I put this stuff to the test, following Maurizio Leo's starter-creation instructions and his beginner's sourdough recipe. It really enveloped my life, becoming an oddly emotional roller coaster for someone like me who was not on the lookout for new hobbies.
Leo breaks bread making down into eight main steps, in addition to the daily care of your starter. There is a lot to learn for each part of the process. When you're busy learning or getting better at a bunch of consecutive new steps, errors can compound, potentially not even presenting themselves immediately. Controlling a few variables helps keep you on the right path and I appreciated both the Sourdough Home and the DoughBed because they clearly helped keep things moving in the right direction. In the end, it was not bakery-quality bread I made, but it was surprisingly good and something I was happy to share. I have no doubt that using both helped make for a better final product.
It's definitely possible to approximate the temperatures you're looking for with these new devices by putting your starter in a warm spot in your home like on top of the fridge, next to the rice cooker, or, the herpetologist's favorite, on top of a $13 reptile heating pad. (Hat tip to Paul Adams at America's Test Kitchen who turned me on to that one!) If you can get the right temperature consistently using one of those options, go for it. But if you are new to the game, like the process, want to keep some uncertainty out of it, and are perhaps on a bit of a schedule, you might want to take a closer look at them. They will take some of the guesswork out of your baking and get you to better bread sooner.
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