Sourdough bread is a difficult thing to get right. But Breadwinner, a new smart gadget under development by hardware designers (and bread lovers) Fred Benenson and Sarah Pavis, is trying to unravel the mystery of the yeast by offering a device connected to an app that can track the volume and temperature of your starter and notify you when it’s ready to bake, via Laughing squid.
If you’ve never cooked with a starter before, it’s very different from store-bought yeast. Your starter (mine, in case you’re curious, is called Lancelot) needs to be fed frequently and rises and falls throughout the day as the yeast feeds on the sugars in the flour and creates bubbles of carbon dioxide – the same bubbles that help make your freshly baked bread so fluffy and delicious.
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But discovering When using the starter after feeding is a tricky balance between art and science. What the bread chef intends to do is eliminate the guesswork from the equation, allowing you to track your starter’s growth after feeding and letting you know precisely when the peak is to start mixing your pasta. It also records previous feeds, allowing you to track your starter’s performance over time and adjust the variables to get that perfect bread.
The breadwinner unit itself is designed to fit on top of a 16 ounce Ball Mason jar and works using an infrared sensor to measure the height of the starter. It can also take air temperature readings around to make sure it’s not too hot (or too cold) and includes Wi-Fi connectivity to connect to your smartphone. A button at the top allows you to easily record when you have powered your starter.
The current model – which costs $ 140 – is in the middle of a public prototyping phase. Buying a breadwinner today is emphatically not buying a finished product. The hardware is extremely unfinished and the current version loads via Micro USB, which I fervently hope will be replaced by USB-C in the final product.
Obviously, this is a lot to spend on any gadget, let alone one that is still extremely unfinished and with functions as limited as this one – but if you are someone who really enjoys baking bread, gadgets and data analysis, it can be fun beyond of your kitchen.
The breadwinner team is also planning to use feedback from early users – and valuable data from different types of starters, flour mixes and feeding schedules from more users – to further refine the product before a commercially produced version arrives. in the future. It may be worth the wait if you prefer a more refined (or cheaper) product. To sweeten the pot, the prototype also comes with access to a Discord breadwinner and a $ 50 discount on the final model when it launches.
The breadwinner is not just a single gadget. The site is presented as an online community for bread enthusiasts, a self-described “social yeast network” that aims to be a place for bakers to post recipes, share pictures of bread and also get advice from other bakers.