Every hobby I’d picked up in the last couple of years had a screen attached to it somewhere — a game, a tracking app, a tutorial playing in the background. I didn’t plan to fix that on purpose, but a coworker gave me a jar of sourdough starter she was splitting off from her own, and that was that.
The first two weeks were mostly failure
My first three loaves were dense enough to use as doorstops. I’d been feeding the starter inconsistently and baking on a schedule that suited my calendar instead of the dough’s, which — it turns out — is not how any of this works. Sourdough doesn’t care that you have a meeting at eleven.
What actually fixed it was slowing down: feeding the starter at the same time every morning, and accepting that a loaf might need a four-hour bulk ferment on a warm day and six on a cool one. There’s no app notification for “the dough is ready.” You just have to look at it.
Why this is the part I didn’t expect
The actual baking takes maybe twenty minutes of hands-on effort spread across a whole day. Everything else is waiting, checking, waiting again. I’ve started doing that waiting without my phone nearby, mostly by accident — flour-covered hands don’t mix well with a touchscreen — and it’s become the one stretch of most days where I’m not half-looking at something else.
Steve the starter is doing fine. The loaves are getting better. Neither of those things needed to be optimized, and that’s apparently the whole point.