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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

sourdough

FirstBuild’s Latest Funky Kitchen Gadget is a Device Which Feeds & Manages Your Sourdough Starter

In a world where many kitchen appliance brands have downsized or eliminated their innovation arms, FirstBuild, the device innovation and incubation for GE Appliances, is generating (and building) more ideas than ever.

The group, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, has developed 104 products and features, with 37 making their way into the GE Appliances portfolio. Along the way, it has raised over $5.2 million through crowdfunding and built a community of 245,000 builders who submit ideas, vote on projects, and occasionally back them financially.

Unlike traditional corporate R&D departments, FirstBuild invites its community of makers, engineers, and consumers to contribute ideas and test prototypes in its 35,000-square-foot makerspace at the University of Louisville. This approach has led to some viral hits, including the Opal Nugget Ice Maker, which launched on Indiegogo and raised $2.8 million before a prototype was even completed. FirstBuild was also the birthplace of the Arden indoor smoker, a CES 2024 hit that is rapidly gaining a fanbase in the grilling community.

Sourdough Sidekick - Design Reveal (UPDATE)

FirstBuild’s latest project is designed for home bakers who love sourdough but don’t want the hassle of maintaining a starter. Currently in prototype stage, the Sourdough Sidekick automates the feeding process, ensuring the starter stays healthy and ready without the daily commitment. While traditional methods require constant attention, FirstBuild claims the Sidekick can sustain a starter for up to seven days, adapting to the home baker’s schedule. The device features a built-in flour hopper, water tank, and a smart dispensing system that measures and delivers the right amounts to keep the starter thriving. It will also monitor ambient kitchen conditions, making adjustments as needed to optimize fermentation.

Of course, FirstBuild’s Sidekick isn’t the first smart sourdough manager on the market. Fred Benenson, former head of data for Kickstarter, created Breadwinner during the pandemic, a smart sourdough monitoring device that tracks a starter’s growth and notifies bakers when it reaches peak activity, ensuring optimal baking times. Priced at $50, Breadwinner features real-time monitoring and smart notifications, allowing bakers to receive alerts via email, pop-ups, or SMS.

The Sidekick, in contrast, is more of a full-fledged automated feeder and management appliance, offering a more hands-off approach. Given its more advanced functionality, it’s likely to come at a significantly higher price than Breadwinner’s affordable $50 price tag.

While the sourdough craze of the pandemic has certainly cooled, my guess is there are still far more home bakers today than there were five years ago and there’s a good chance rising food prices may even spark a new wave of would-be bread bakers looking to make fresh loaves at home. If that’s the case, FirstBuild’s Sourdough Sidekick could arrive at just the right time to offer enthusiasts an easy way to feed both their baking obsession and their hungry starters.

Breadwinner Launches Presale for Its Sensor-Powered Sourdough Starter Monitoring Tool

If you thought sourdough mania ended when the pandemic wound down, it’s worth scanning social media to realize nothing is further from the truth. The groups and rosters of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram overflow with topics as diverse as “Sourdough Starters – Sourdough Support Group,” “Sourdough Geeks,” and “Sourdough Bread Bakers India.”

Sourdough is about community; no one knows that better than Fred Benenson, the man behind Breadwinner, a sensor-driven tool that helps home bakers manage their sourdough starters. Breadwinner, a high-tech jar lid, launches its crowdfunding campaign today, hoping to hit $35,000 in pledges. This new entry to the crowd-funding arena is a data drive device that uses battery-powered sensors to measure a starter’s height and temperature; Breadwinner and its companion app seamlessly sync with the cloud to record the starter’s behavior over 36 hours. The crowdfunding campaign even includes an option for an add-on where Benenson and company will send you Benenson’s own Breadberry starter.

Once your starter hits its peak fermentation, Breadwinner lets you know it’s time to start making your dough and gives you a precise measurement of how long it took (e.g., “Your starter took 9 hours and 32 minutes to reach its peak.”)

Benenson’s interest in sourdough blossomed when he happened upon a cooking class where the guy teaching it “has a Ph.D. in yeast biology.” It became a learning experience for the tech veteran starting around 2010 when his journey began into the finer aspects of working with a starter. After immersing himself in his work at Kickstarter, Benenson took a break around 2018 and 2019 and dug into the social media sourdough world. Tickled when he learned that people named their starter cultures, Benenson was ready to make an impact in the space.

“It was really a little bit of a mystery when it behaved well and when it didn’t,” Benenson told The Spoon in a recent interview. “I knew if I kept on it, (the starter) would get into shape.” Deploying his refined data skills, he made a spreadsheet to help him track his starter’s behavior and learn its optimal time for baking.

Success with an early prototype of Breadwinner led to some positive feedback which encouraged Benenson to enlist the help of some hardware experts and build the product he brings to market on Kickstarter.

“I thought, okay, if I could make (the initial version) work, and people would spend $150 on it, there’s a market here,” Benenson said. “I thought I would sell a dozen, which would’ve been a successful beta. But we ended up selling three or four dozen of them, got some nice writeups, and got on people’s radar. And I was like, oh, okay. This is, there’s enough of a market for me to take it to the next phase.”

While other products manage or facilitate manipulation of sourdough starters, Benenson knew building a community around his Breadwinner would give it an edge. The role of community with Breadwinner is for users to share recipes, provide each other tips and tricks, and even if need be, offer tech support.

“There’s a couple of reasons I’ve decided to start with a community,” he explained. “First is it’s kind of just my intuition, and I spent a lot of time in that kind of open source and Wikipedia and Creative Commons world before I worked at Kickstarter. And when I worked at Kickstarter, I think one of the defining features of running Kickstarter projects was that you get a really great community at the end of it. And those people follow you, and if you treat them well and you’re honest and straightforward with them, they’re fans for life.”

You can check out the Breadwinner crowdfunding campaign here.

Introducing Breadwinner

Sourdough Savior: A New Machine Keeps Your Starter Fresh and Alive

One of the byproducts of the COVID-19 pandemic was the rise (no pun intended) of sourdough baking. Quicker than you can say, “cabin fever,” a nation of wanna-be bakers turned their homes into warm and crusty boulangeries. Key to the process is what’s known as a sourdough starter, a mixture of flour and water that has been fermented by naturally occurring yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

While hearty in nature, starters need a bit of TLC to do their thing optimally. Enter Sourhouse co-founders Erik Fabian and Jennifer Yoko Olson, two bakers who brought their skills as marketers and industrial design, respectively, to create Goldie, an appliance built to keep sourdough starters at an ideal temperature. The proper temperature for a sourdough starter is between 75-85°F (24-30°C), and this range provides the warm environment needed for the yeast and bacteria in the starter to thrive. Too hot and the starter may over-ferment, while too cold can slow or halt the fermentation process.

Fabian and Olson’s entry into the world of sourdough baking is called Goldie, as in Goldilocks of The Three Bears fame. Goldie is built to provide just enough warmth to keep a sourdough starter consistently in the “Goldilocks Zone” (as in not too hot, not too cold).

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Fabian explained that the idea for Goldie preceded the pandemic and was born out of his sourdough starter issues. “You know, New York apartment, it was getting down below 60, and it was just too cold for my starter,” he said. “I didn’t really understand the way temperature interacted with my starter at that point. So, I found a warm spot, which became a DIY trick. As I continued to bake, I found that my starter was kind of like always searching for a warm spot.”

Once COVID came along, with the assistance of Olson, an experienced product designer, discovery met opportunity.” We didn’t want to make something like smart technology. We wanted to be like dumb technology for marketing because there’s enough complexity to baking with sourdough, so we wanted to create something simple. My basic idea early on was like a warming base with a transparent dome,” Fabian said.

The next step was Kickstarter, where Goldie was introduced in April 2022. Ending in October, Sourhouse’s offering drew 1,007 backers who pledged $103,948, almost triple the $39,000 original ask. Along with the Goldie apparatus, the Kickstarter kit came with a cooling puck that a baker can keep in the freezer if the starter overheats and needs quick cooling.

With fermentation a thing now, what are the thoughts about the extensibility of Goldie? Would it work for other types of fermented foods? While Fabian wouldn’t be specific about such next steps, it’s clear he and Olson are on to something, given proper fermentation for everything from sauerkraut to kombucha works best with controlled temperatures.

“Our focus on bread is really because, from my point of view is like I think it’s one of the most accessible points to entry into fermentation,” Fabian commented, “probably along with sauerkraut. And you know, I think it’s just easier to launch a brand and a business around a more targeted kind of idea.”

Spoken like a true marketer.

Sourd.io is the High-Tech Sourdough Starter Monitor All of Us Newbie Bakers Could Use

I think my sourdough starter is on life support. I’ve discarded it, fed it, proofed it, but it still seems… anemic. I think? I dunno, like so many other trapped at home, this is my first sourdough starter so I’m kind flying blind. But maybe I don’t have to, thanks to a high-tech gizmo put together by Christine Sunu (hat tip to The Verge).

Yesteray, Sunu published a pair of posts on the Twilio (where she works) blog about a DIY device she created to check in on your sourdough starter. Dubbed Sourd.io, the device is basically a cap that fits on top of your starter jar and monitors the temperature, humidity, and rise level of your sourdough so you know when it needs to be fed.

But we’re sorry to say that this solution is not for the technological faint of heart. The instructions involve setting up a Twilio Developer Kit for Narrowband IoT (which also means you can only use it in the US), the Arduino IDE, and the use of a 3D printer. But hey, since you’re stuck at home learning new skills, why not add building electronics to your repertoire?

While there are countless awful things about this pandemic, one bright spot has been the resourcefulness of people in coming up with innovative solutions to everyday problems. Last week Adrien Hertel released a free, downloadable JavaScript program that alerts you when delivery slots at Amazon and Whole Foods open up.

If you’ve come across other DIY solutions to quarantine-induced issues, drop us a line and let us know!

Sourdough Bread is Taking over Instagram Right Now

If you’ve scrolled through Instagram lately, you’ve probably noticed a sudden uptick in people posting about their #quarantinelife baked goods. But one in particular has people Insta-bragging like never before: sourdough bread.

Really, it makes so much sense that people are hopping on the sourdough bread train. Making it requires very few inputs (just flour and water), but also demands frequent care throughout a day — the kneading, proofing, and baking process takes around 24 hours total. But the end results are utterly delicious, even for inexperienced bakers. And bonus, you don’t have to go to the grocery store and risk contamination to get your bread!

As with many things in our digitally connected life — like workouts, beauty tutorials, and more — people feel the need to share their baking exploits on Instagram. In fact there are 2.7 million posts tagged #sourdough on the ‘gram right now. The fact that NYT Cooking’s lead newsletter story this week was about making your own sourdough means that we’ll likely be seeing a lot more #artisanbread posts coming our way over the next few weeks.

My first attempt at sourdough bread. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Being a good millennial, I had to try my hand at sourdough this week. I’d gotten a starter from a friend which had laid dormant in my fridge. A few days of feeding later, plus an intensive 24 hours of kneading, resting, and proofing near the heater in my bedroom, and I had two pretty good loaves of sourdough!

Did I share it on Instagram? Of course I did. And I got comments back of people sending me their own photos of sourdough, focaccia, pretzels, and other yeasty endeavors. One friend and I decided that we would do a loaf exchange for our next round of sourdough baking. Another asked me to drop off some of my starter so she could start baking, too.

Unfortunately, my sourdough ambitions are on hold at the moment since every grocery store I’ve visited over the past few days has been 100 percent out of flour. Which just goes to show — if social media didn’t illustrate the point enough already — that we’re all baking to relieve stress and feed our loved ones. Because when everything seems uncertain and sometimes downright scary, it’s reassuring to care for something else — even if that something else is just a sourdough starter.

Just don’t forget to post your results on Instagram. #Sourdough #naturallyleavened #wildyeast