Making bread can be hard and lonely. I want to change that.
Today I’m launching Breadwinner, a community for bakers. It’s in public beta, so please drop by and sign up to take a peek while it’s fresh.
First I want to explain to you how I got here. The story begins with an old friend, Concord Jr.
Back in 2010, I took a bread baking class at Brooklyn Kitchen. I had been cooking and baking for a while, but had always been a little afraid of the mysterious process of fermentation that helps turn a jar of flour, water, bacteria, and yeast into delicious sourdough bread.
At the class, I met Concord. Concord was the name of our teacher’s “starter” — a special concoction of yeast and bacteria that lived in a sealed Mason jar. Every baker, it turns out, names their starter. Which makes sense to some extent, but I never had the heart to change Concord’s given name, so I went with Concord Jr.
A starter is a living, breathing complex that needs food, heat, and love if it’s to survive and thrive and give you food and heat and love back. I got to take a part of Concord back with me to begin my own journey.
Learning how to work with Concord to make sourdough wasn’t easy. That’s definitely part of the fun — tweaking how I cared for Concord Jr., finding the right food, finding the right corner of my kitchen counter that catches the sun at the right angle to keep Concord Jr. happy. The internet, of course, is full of opinions on this matter.
Occasionally Concord Jr. and I would have moments of greatness. After a feeding I’d watch as the slurry of yeast and flour and water and bacteria would expand, climbing the inside of a mason jar. And I’d wonder: what exactly is going on in there?
But mostly, Concord Jr. and I made mediocre bread together. I was still obsessed with the idea of baking sourdough, but kept wondering what was wrong. Was it me? Was it Concord Jr.?
Maybe I was feeding it too much. No, it was probably that I was feeding it too little. I needed to not feed it, starve the thing, and then I should feed it, then I should bake with it.
Concord Jr.’s behavior was mysterious but intriguing. I knew there was a lot more to maintaining a starter than whatever I was doing. At the time, I had just started working at Kickstarter — their second employee! — so I decided to put Concord Jr. in deep hibernation in the back of my fridge.
A decade later, when I found myself with enough time working from home in San Francisco, it felt like the right time to pick up sourdough again. (Concord Jr. had met an unfortunate end years earlier in my dishwasher in New York thanks to a well intentioned house cleaner, but I acquired a new starter friend named Tim from my friend Tim Vollmer, in Oakland.)
So much had changed on the internet in ten years, but weirdly not much in the sourdough world. There was the same haphazard patchwork of passionate personal recipes from talented amateur bakers, which was charming but still frustrating for a newcomer like me. As much guidance was out there on forums, I felt very much alone.
Deep in the comments section of the NYTimes’s repost of the Tartine Country Bread recipe, I noticed someone suggested creating a spreadsheet for scheduling the various steps and timings over the course of a couple days.
I wanted to give back, so that’s what I did in 2018: I made the Breadsheet.
Breadsheet took on a life of its own, and to this day, a couple years later, I still discover folks hanging out in there and leaving comments.
Breadsheet eventually led to an interview in Eater for a story on technologists like myself discovering (for better or for worse) the joys of baking.
And while Breadsheet allowed me to gain confidence on timing how to bake best, my loaves were still not coming out much better than they were in 2010.
I was lucky. I managed to get some very good advice from a semi-professional baker I looked up to. Thanks to his suggestions, my starter had a new lease on life and the quality of my bakes dramatically increased. Having access to this kind of advice and encouragement changed my enthusiasm and attitude significantly.
So guess what! It wasn’t me that was the problem. It was that my starter wasn’t thriving. I can only imagine how many people give up on making bread simply because they can’t get their starter going.
So I started wondering: What would an even better baking community online look like?
Could there be a way to use technology to help people’s starters thrive? Sourdough is hard, but it doesn’t have to be lonely and hard.
And while bakers have been using Reddit and Instagram to show off their loaves for ages, these are general purpose social networks awkwardly retrofit for a craft that goes much deeper than mere photos and comments. For example, many bakers on Instagram try to include a rough baker’s percentage recipe in the captions of their posts, but the app almost always botches the formatting which can make it really difficult to track and replicate a recipe yourself.
Surely there could be a better way to share and learn from each other’s baking experience.
And maybe, just maybe, technology could help unlock some of the mysteries of fermentation so this beautiful craft could be available to even more people.
This problem really inspired me, and as both a technologist and avid baker, I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunity. Eventually I realized I should be the person to build this community.
… introducing Breadwinner
Breadwinner is a community for you to find what to bake, see what others are baking, and establish a home for your starter on the web.
My hope is that it will provide a space for you to feel about the great journey of baking, whether that means just getting started or experimenting with advanced recipes.
Each time you log a bake Breadwinner shows off all the little details that went into making your bread — from the starter you used to the baker’s percentage of that exact recipe.
One of the things I’m most excited to unveil is a custom, curated search engine featuring some of the best baking recipes on the web.
Breadwinner may be the only structured data repository of baking recipes on the web. We had to manually visit all of these recipes to compile this list but the results speak for themselves: a one-of-a-kind tag based search engine that makes it incredibly easy to find a great recipe.
When you find one that you’re interested in, click “I want to bake this” and you’ll be presented with a way to modify the recipe to your liking. If you’re used to working with bakers percentages, it automatically calculates those for you on the fly, which is especially handy if you want to make last minute changes to a recipe and record them easily:
And if you’ve spent any time in the kitchen trying to modify a recipe into something greater, you’ll know how much of a difference notes can make. With Breadwinner, recording your modifications to a recipe is easy.
This also makes it really easy to change the eventual size of your bread by scaling it up or down. Simply enter the eventual dough weight to your desired goal, and the rest of the recipe weights recalculate automatically using baker’s percentages.
Finally, there’s a straightforward system to get feedback on your bakes: every time you post a bake you’ll be able to rate how it went and ask for specific feedback around whatever you like. You can also mark bakes as private if you’d just like to keep them to yourself.
This is just the beginning…
I’ve been working on Breadwinner with the help of some friends* since 2019 (believe it or not I had this idea before sourdough had it’s moment thanks to the pandemic), and we are so excited for it’s next phase of fermentation: public beta.
Which is to say: if you run into bugs my apologies in advance — please drop us a line to let us know. Also, if you don’t initially see your email confirmation, please check your spam as our email servers are still warming up.
I’m setting up a Discord server to hang out, report bugs, and suggest feedback. Otherwise you can find me on Breadwinner here, or drop me a line at fred@breadwinner.life if you’d like to talk carbs or code.
Happy fermenting!
Fred
*Baking Breadwinner would not have been possible without the caring help of Elizabeth Goodspeed, Sarah Pavis, Dan Rome, Star Simpson, Nick Sylvester, Jamin Warren, Ryan Bradley, George Quraishi, Brendan Miller, Sid Krishnan, Tieg Zaharia, Noah Feehan, Charles Adler, Justin Kazmark, Eric Migicovsky, Stephanie Greelings, Kenzi Connor, and Cody Gilfoyle. Thank you all so much for your support and hard work.
