A starter isn't a recipe you follow, it's a culture you learn to read — the smell and the bubbles are it talking to you, and this course is just teaching you the language.
What you’ll be able to do
- Build an active sourdough starter from nothing but flour and water, and know exactly what day-by-day signs mean it's alive and working
- Judge starter readiness using the float test plus backup visual cues (bubbles, dome, doubling) instead of guessing
- Mix, bulk ferment, shape, score, and bake one reliable basic loaf with steam-assisted oven spring
- Diagnose a dense or flat loaf by narrowing the cause to weak starter, under-fermentation, or a technique error — and fix it next bake
- Maintain your starter on a schedule that matches how often you actually bake, and revive it after a week or more of neglect
What’s inside your school
6 modules · 19 lessons
Sourdough Foundations: What You're Actually Working With
Before touching flour, beginners need the mental model: what wild yeast fermentation is, the vocabulary every recipe assumes you already know, and realistic timeline expectations so a slow starter doesn't feel like failure. This module prevents the two most common early dropout causes: confusion and discouragement.
Setting Up Your Starter From Scratch
This module moves from theory to action: the minimal tools required, how flour and water choice affects the culture you're capturing, and mixing the actual first batch. It's deliberately small in scope so beginners start today instead of over-researching gear.
The Starter's First Two Weeks: Reading What's Happening
This is where beginners either quit or push through — the acetone smell, the erratic bubbling, and the confusing feeding math. Teaching the science behind each stage turns anxiety into pattern recognition.
Confirming Readiness and Baking Your First Loaf
With a living starter established, this module covers the actual mechanics of turning it into bread — from testing readiness through the exact recipe, mixing, fermenting, shaping, and baking. Each step builds directly on vocabulary and starter behavior taught earlier.
Diagnosing Dense Crumb and Poor Rise
This is the judgement module: the difference between beginners who eventually bake reliably and those who stay stuck is knowing why a loaf failed, not just following steps blindly. Focuses on the three real causes of dense crumb and how to read dough instead of watching a clock.
Baking For Real, Long-Term
The final module turns a one-time success into a repeatable skill: maintaining the starter according to how often you actually bake, reviving it after neglect, and running your own bake start-to-finish without hand-holding. This is the bridge from following a course to baking independently.
Is this you?
The over-researcher
Has read fifteen blog posts with contradictory feeding ratios and still hasn't mixed flour and water, because they're waiting to find the 'right' method instead of just one that works.
The one who already killed a starter
Tried once, saw hooch or an acetone smell, panicked, and threw it out — never learned that both are normal signs of a working culture, not a dying one.
The recipe-follower with no feedback loop
Baked a dense brick, followed the recipe exactly, and has no idea if the problem was the starter, the timing, or the shaping — so they can't fix anything, only repeat it.
The gear-anxious beginner
Believes they need a banneton, a Dutch oven, and bread flour shipped from somewhere special before they're allowed to start, so they never start.
The inconsistent home baker
Has had one good loaf and three bad ones and can't explain the difference, because they were watching the clock instead of reading the dough.
The busy neglecter
Fed the starter religiously for a week, then life happened, and now there's a jar of grey liquid in the fridge they're afraid to open.
A note from your teacher
A note from your teacher
The first starter I ever grew, I killed with kindness. I fed it every twelve hours like a nervous new parent, panicked when it didn't double, and threw it out after five days because I'd read somewhere that if it wasn't bubbling like champagne by day three, it was dead. It wasn't dead. It was just a starter, doing what starters do at room temperature in a slightly too-cold kitchen. I started over three times before I let one actually live long enough to work.
Most sourdough advice assumes you already know what a healthy starter looks like, so it skips the part where yours looks nothing like the photos and you have no idea if that's normal. It also treats troubleshooting as an afterthought, a paragraph at the bottom, when honestly the troubleshooting is the whole skill. Nobody tells you that your first several loaves are supposed to be a little dense, a little confusing, and that this is how you learn to read dough instead of just following steps.
This course is built around one starter and one loaf, repeated until it's boring, because that repetition is where the actual learning happens. Instead of a wall of recipes, you get a small set of visual and smell checkpoints for the starter, a single dependable loaf formula, and a troubleshooting section organized by symptom, so when your crumb turns out dense or your loaf won't rise, you go straight to the likely cause instead of rereading everything from scratch.
If you've been putting this off because you don't want to fail publicly, good news, nobody's watching. Go grab some flour and let's start the starter.