Sourdough Guides

Good sourdough is mostly a few numbers and a few routines, repeated. These guides explain the ones that matter most — what they mean, how to calculate them, and how to use them so your next loaf is a deliberate result rather than a happy accident.

Start here

• Dough hydration — what hydration percentage actually means, how to calculate it, and how it changes the way a dough handles and bakes.
• Baker’s percentage — the universal recipe language that lets you scale a formula up or down without guesswork.
• Starter care — feeding ratios, room-temp vs. fridge routines, and how to read when a starter is ready to bake.

Why a number-first approach helps

A recipe tells you what worked once. A formula — expressed in percentages — tells you why it worked, so you can repeat it at any batch size or adapt it to a different flour. Once you can read hydration and baker’s percentage, most “why did this happen?” questions about crumb, spread, and rise start to have answers.

Keeping those numbers in one place is exactly what Sourdough Journal is for: it logs your starters and bakes and keeps the hydration, scaling, levain, and baker’s-percentage math in sync as you go — so the calculation never gets in the way of the bake.