I built a sourdough planner so I'd stop looking up a recipe every week

Recently, I got into baking sourdough, and every week started off with the same dilemma. I'd closed my tabs and lost the recipe from last week, and yes I should have bookmarked it, so I'd start searching for a recipe.

Every search had me looking at a different one. The advice out there isn't contradictory in the sense that it'll mess you up. It's just all over the place. Some say you have to build a levain, others skip it. Every one I found said four sets of stretch and folds, and nobody mentions that if you've used a stand mixer you don't need to.

What I wanted was somewhere to record what I'd tried, which bakes I'd done and which recipes I had, and a way to quickly work out new options to try.

So I built one. It's made for a phone or a tablet on the kitchen counter, with big numbers and a keypad for every field.

What it does

You tell it one of two things. Either you've got this much starter, so what can I make from it? Or you want these things, so how much starter do you need to have ready? From there it works out the mix: flour, water, starter and salt. The water and the flour already inside the starter are counted, so the hydration it shows is the real one and not the recipe's pretend one.

Then it divides the dough. Everything you make is a preset with a weight per piece: a loaf, a pizza base, a bread roll, a burger bun, a baguette. Say how many of each you want and it tells you the weight to divide off for every piece, and whether you've got dough spare or you're short.

Then the timeline. Give it a start time and it lays the whole bake out on the clock: mix, bulk ferment with the folds at 30-minute intervals, divide, bench rest, and then a lane for each thing you're making with its own shape, proof and bake. Every duration can be changed and the rest of the plan moves with it. Tick stand mixer and the folds drop to one set, because the mixer has done the gluten work up front. If two bakes want the oven at the same time it says so and suggests an order.

The bulk time is a guide and the step says so. It's estimated from the dough temperature, from a table you can edit, but the dough is the target: 50 to 75 % risen, domed and jiggly, whatever the clock says.

The bake that made it worth it

I made two loaves, two pizza doughs and five rolls all in one hit, all off one dough. Making sure I had enough dough, and working out what the splits were, would have been a fun task. Using the planner it was trivial. It told me how much starter to have ready, what went into the mix, the weight of every piece and when everything had to happen.

The newer part, which that bake didn't need, is other doughs alongside the main one. A dough is its own thing in the planner: a soft bun dough with milk, egg and butter, a buttered one, a jalapeño cheddar, a seeded one, or anything you add yourself. Some get cut out of the main dough partway through bulk, with the cheese or the seeds worked into that portion. Some have to be mixed on their own, because egg and milk have to go in with the water. The planner knows which is which and says why on the plan, and the starter it asks for covers every mix.

So far I've only baked the jalapeño and cheese. The rest are there for when I get to them, which is the "new options to try" part.

Keeping a record

Every dough has a notes box, "what you did and how it went", and every bake has one too. A plan gets saved by name, so when a Saturday goes well I can load the same plan next week instead of reconstructing it. That's what I was missing before: the recipe I actually used, with my own notes on it, rather than whichever one the search found that week.

There's a kitchen mode that turns the plan into the day's job list in clock order and keeps the screen awake, so I'm not thumbing the phone with floury hands. It prints too, if you'd rather have the plan on paper next to the scales.

It isn't a public site, but if you'd like to use it you can host it yourself from the repo.