Stop guessing when your starter is ready: the single biggest improvement you can make as a sourdough baker is knowing how and when your starter is most active. Breadwinner sends you a notification when your starter is ready to go.

Sourdough starters are mysterious colonies of microbes evolved to help humans bake the tastiest bread on Earth, but starters can be stubborn and mercurial.

We set out to solve this with Breadwinner.

The guts of Breadwinner are pretty simple – a couple of battery powered sensors that measure height and temperature. Each time you feed your starter, Breadwinner seamlessly syncs with the cloud to record your starter’s behavior over the course of 36 hours. 

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.")

By crunching all these numbers behind the scene for you, Breadwinner takes the guesswork out of gluten.

Breadwinner might seem really nerdy, but it’s actually the perfect beginner’s tool. We built this to help you nurture, coax, and cultivate your starter from scratch so you can get the most out of your time in the kitchen. 

Simple - click the top of Breadwinner when you complete your feeding, and you'll be notified when it's ready at it's peak.

 
Along with blinking green, Breadwinner will send you an SMS, email, or browser notification with how long it took to rise.

You can then use that information to determine how long to let your dough proof.

Home baking is an adventure but you can’t change what you don’t measure. Breadwinner makes it easy to log notes on every feeding, recipe, and bake, so you can remember what worked, and what didn’t.

The growth curve of your yeast can vary a lot – everything from the type of flour, the amount of water you mix in to your kitchen's temperature. 

Breadwinner is the only way to measure it accurately.

Each time you feed your starter, Breadwinner dutifully records all the relevant information so you can track its progress and figure out what is working.

You can also record notes for each feeding, such as the type of flour you used, or other things you're experimenting with.

This should let you quickly home in on your ideal baking routine: do you prefer a low-engagement, slow-fermenting approach where the bread comes together over a few days, or a fast-paced weekend morning of productive baking? Knowing how to change your starter technique will help you plan for (and enjoy more) delicious bakes.

Want to see more? Check out Fred's starter Breadberry here.

Breadwinner is also the only place on the web aggregating data across thousands of different starters. We’re so excited to dig in deep and refine our collective understanding of yeast and bacteria with your help and data.

Time and temperature are deceptively simple variables in any bake; we’ve found in our testing that Breadwinner helps you quickly build a solid intuition around how to tune your starter for fast rises, deeper flavor, and more consistent results.

Even better, Breadwinner will automatically let you know if your starter gets too hot or too cold!

Knowing something as simple as “leaving my starter by the window means it’ll take 90 fewer minutes to rise” can be the difference between a stress-free baking Saturday and a frustrating failure.

Anytime you can make a home-cooked meal, you’re ahead of the game when it comes to healthy choices and wholesome ingredients. Making baking an easy, fun part of your home-cooking routine is one of the most satisfying parts of working with Breadwinner.

The breadwinner.life community is the perfect place to ask for help, since we can all see how your starter was doing before it went into the oven. 

It's also a place to share your bakes, get feedback, and discover new recipes. 

 

On Breadwinner, your starter has a home where you can show off its performance, past bakes, and stats. 

There’s a lot of garbage online right now, and hardware you don’t need or don’t care about.

We love Breadwinner and think you will too, and at the end of the day, it’s something you should be able to enjoy without worrying about the rest of the world.