Do you bake bread as often as you would like? What are your biggest breadmaking roadblocks?

I’m determined to create a book that will help people to bake more bread, and I’m wondering if I’ve addressed every possible issue...

What are the things that have prevented you from making your own sourdough or yeast bread in the past?

Please feel free to give feedback and suggestions here to help get more people baking great bread at home!

The main roadblocks I can see are lack of time, lack of organisation, and unpredictable lives. I’m creating some strategies and recipes to address these - are any of these things that make it difficult for you to make bread? Are they something that you’ve overcome? How have you overcome these difficulties?

Also a couple of other things I think may be roadblocks for some might be perfectionism and analysis paralysis - too many bread experts saying that you absolutely have to do this and absolutely can’t do that, and conflicting experts saying different things, it’s hard to know where to start - I’m addressing this by going through every possible option for natural breadmaking and explaining why it is done, so that the reader can choose for themselves what steps to take, and create recipes and timelines that work for them.

What other things might prevent people from making bread as often as they would like?

I bake sourdough about as often as I’d like, especially since I developed a process around a countertop version of the Estella dough mixer (specifically I have a vevor knockoff of it that cost about 450 dollars). Process is: feed starter the night before, weigh starter and water in a bowl, pour into mixer, weigh flour in a dry bowl, put in mixer, turn on mixer, go do other things for 5-8 minutes, turn off mixer, wait 20 minutes, add salt and a bit more water, turn on mixer, watch until dough is cohesive, turn off mixer, set a timer for 20 minutes, when the timer goes off turn on the mixer for 30 seconds or so. Repeat 6-8 times, then shape loaves into baskets and let rise for 90-120 minutes. Then bake in my countertop steam oven (20 minutes at 490° at 100% humidity, 10 minutes at 400° at 0% humidity)

I would pay, I dunno, probably 600 dollars, for a version of this mixer with an integrated scale and a way to remotely turn it on and off (or even program a schedule/recipe). The steam oven is quite a luxury, the people who made it got bought by Electrolux and discontinued the version that cost 500 dollars to release a new version that has AI Slop (tm) and costs 1100 dollars and has a 10 dollar subscription fee. It’s notoriously prone to failure and difficult to repair. If it breaks I’m very likely to buy a commercial combi steam oven for my home kitchen.


I got the mixer to make brioche. I still don’t make brioche as often as I’d like because I have to make a poolish, and wait for 4 hours, and then rising/stretching/folding/shaping brioche takes like, 6ish hours, and if I don’t start right when I wake up, or forget to do a step on time, or if it looks like it needs more rising time, then I have to bake it after bedtime or I have to make it slow down enough to bake the next morning, which is a hassle. So basically if I don’t have poolish ready by noon I don’t make brioche anymore, same goes for baguettes.

Aside from these quite silly technical challenges, my biggest obstacle to baking more is that my partner keeps complaining about “simple sugars” and “cholesterol tests” and other nonsense. My mother also complains endlessly about how many bread calories she eats when she visits because the bread tastes so good.

I occasionally bake bread, but would love to get to the rhythm of baking sourdough bread. The trouble there is that I don't have a starter.
I've tried to start a starter a couple of times, but failed.
I also got a starter once from someone, but it didn't do anything - at all, ever. So I'm assuming the starter was dead. I did feed it, but nothing happened.

i think you're doing well to address the "overanalysis" aspect that has permeated sourdough/baking culture (and beermaking). Reading some of the things out there I might feel like if I can't use one specific percentage protein flour and maintain at perfect temp X I cannot make bread (and my 88-year old mother in law would laugh and laugh). Especially when you're in places where you can't (or won't) get specific italian 00 flour on Amazon, for example, it can feel hopeless.

I realize this is not something you can do anything about, but the reason I stopped making sourdough was the skyrocketing price of cooking gas-- it was no longer feasible. I don't have space for a rocket oven here in my urban setting, but a few years ago I got myself an air fryer oven, which (wouldn't you know) turns out to make really good sourdough. I revived my starter recently to get back into the groove. Maybe consider encouraging people to try other baking options? In the meantime, most of the bread we have been making was steamed (Chinese buns) or cooked in a plan (turkish flatbread, etc), and occasionally even in the rice cooker.

Nina Surya wrote:I've tried to start a starter a couple of times, but failed.
I also got a starter once from someone, but it didn't do anything - at all, ever. So I'm assuming the starter was dead. I did feed it, but nothing happened.

I know this is off topic, Nina, but if you open up a thread here we have a bunch of sourdough bakers (including myself) who would be happy to help you make a starter from scratch and get baking! Tell us what you've tried so far, we can troubleshoot, and you can start again.

Tereza Okava wrote: ...if you open up a thread here ...

Thank you Tereza! Heading that way NOW :)

PS. The link took me to somewhere else, but I posted my question here.

Lack of time is the biggest. Also, even with a good schedule/routine, stuff happens (i.e. I got off work 2 hours late and am exhausted and the schedule is thrown off). I end up making discard recipes a lot more often. I don't love the fact that I HAVE to feed the starter. While I actually enjoy a routine, sometimes things get overwhelming and one more thing that I HAVE to do at a very specific time can be a deterrent of sorts. I guess what I'm getting at is I want to figure out how to be more flexible when it comes to baking sourdough bread. I guess I could bake other types of bread, but I really prefer sourdough in terms of nutrition.

One more thing maybe off-topic: I would love to find a sourdough bread recipe that works with my oval romertopf clay baker with glazed bottom (it should not be preheated empty).

Hi Kate! Cheese and now sourdough, hooray and thank you!

I've been doing the sourdough bread dance every week for several years now, but still have much to learn. My goal was always to be able to bake like my ancestors, without a scale, without analyzing hydration, just by my hands in the dough. But first I had to learn the  basics. I delved deep into recipes and forums and measured every last particle to the gram like the experts said you must. For years. Technical and intimidating, both.

Once I started getting comfortable with that process, I wanted whole grain that I milled at home, not the shelf-stable stuff on grocery shelves. Fresh-milled flours perform quite differently, and 100% whole grain is harder to make lofty. My loaves went from wondrous to wonky.

Every layer of this process that I uncover, there is another beneath. I am only just getting to a place where I can make a delicious intuitive whole grain bread (no measuring of flour, starter, water or salt). Though I have yet to make a whole grain loaf that rises to the heavens like that sifted shelf stuff.

Still - years later, the number one hardest thing is the timing of it all, and fitting that into a life chock full of other demands. Now that I'm using fresh-milled flours, I am soaking them anywhere from 4-12 hours prior to adding starter. It makes a difference, but is an added time constraint that takes my bakes to three days of process.
Even without the soaking, it's a long haul, the timing of which is dictated by your wee sour-inducing beasties, not you.

How then, to not be held hostage by your bread baking schedule? My dream sourdough baking book would contain tips and tricks for just that.

As an example - and this is something I've never read in any book or forum, but I recently learned (out of necessity, as midnight came and went) it's possible to retard (refrigerate) your dough during bulk ferment instead of the traditional final proof, if your life blows up and you can't keep waiting on it. The bread that emerged from this reverse process, was excellent. That was a freeing lesson!

In hindsight I think it is so much more important to have a good understanding of the science and why bakers do all those technical moves, the secret lives of yeast and bacteria. That good understanding will allow us novice bakers to pivot, explore, make it more of a creative process than simply following another’s route.

You’ve nailed all my issues - the perfection and analysis paralysis is real too. But I’d tell my early baking self that sourdough is like the rest of life, you can’t let fear of messing up stop you. And I would never have believed this in the beginning, but I’ve eaten every single one of my failed lumpy brick-like loaves, and loved them. Eat your failure! You might be surprised at how delicious it is. It’s fun, too. I look forward to reading your work!