You've been reading guides for weeks but haven't baked yet? Why the first, mediocre bake teaches you more than ten YouTube videos. An honest guide for beginners.
If you read along in bread forums, a pattern stands out: people start out wanting to bake a particular thing, read their way through twelve guides, read three Reddit threads, watch four YouTube videos, and then don't bake. Because they're not sure they've got everything "right."
We've both done this ourselves. And we want to tell you honestly what we learned from it: this preparation looks like learning, but it's avoidance.
Baking bread is a hands-on craft. You have to feel how the dough feels when it's ready. You have to see what your crumb looks like the first time you've cut into it. You have to smell what your kitchen does at 26 degrees with an active sourdough.
None of that is in any article. It can't be in there. What's in the article is the theory the author distilled from their 100 bakes. You need your own bakes to translate that into your own experience. Until then, the texts are hints, not solutions.
We say this because we both made the mistake: reading too long, baking too little. At some point Maik started doing one bake a week, no matter how unsure he was. Seb started documenting every pizza dough, even when the result was rubbish. Both of us learned more in three months than in the three years before, when we'd only been informing ourselves.
The first sourdough attempt often goes wrong. Maybe the crumb is too dense. Maybe the crust is too hard. Maybe the bread came out flat because the dough was overproofed. Maybe it's just "okay."
That's exactly the point.
A flat bread shows you what overproofed dough looks like. A too-dense crumb shows you how little oven spring is happening. A hard crust shows you how hot your oven really is. You can't gain these insights through yet another guide, you have to have them.
And the next time you make the same recipe with the same ingredients, you know what you want to do differently. On the second attempt. Not the first.
The other thing that happens when you read too much online: you compare yourself to pictures. Instagram sourdough has an open crumb, beautiful ears, glossy crusts. Reddit's Sourdough of the Week shows something more impressive every week.
Those aren't first bakes. Those are the fiftieth, hundredth, two-hundredth bakes. Experienced bakers show their best results, not their normal ones. Nobody photographs the mediocre bread from Wednesday.
If your first bread doesn't look like the one on Instagram, that doesn't mean you can't do it. It means you're at the start of a learning curve that takes five to ten years if you really want to master it. Baking is slow, and comparing yourself to the best is a very effective way to lose motivation.
Start with a simple recipe. Not the most elaborate, not the most spectacular. One that's described multiple times across many sources, so you have reference points. Plötzblog's "no-knead bread," for example. Three ingredients, one pot, done.
Do the same bake three times in a row. The first time you learn how it works. The second time you understand what you want to do differently. The third time you get a feel for it. These three bakes together get you further than three different breads one after another.
Write down what you did. Which flour, which water temperature, which proofing time, what stood out, what tasted good. Anywhere, so a slip of paper, Notes, in bakeqee (we're building that right now), as long as it's somewhere. Otherwise you start from scratch every time.
Only ask once you have a concrete question. "How does sourdough work" isn't a question, it's a topic area. "Why is my crumb so dense even though I kept to the proofing time" is a question. The second kind of question can be answered, and you get useful answers. The first produces a reading list that lands you back at home, sitting there and not baking.
We don't know a lot. We're not pros. We bake together, learn something new every day, and often only see in hindsight what we could have done better. That's exactly what we wish for you too, so not the perfect bake on the first try, but the start.
You'll bake breads you can't proudly carry out of the kitchen. That's part of it. You'll bake breads that turn out unexpectedly good without your knowing why. That's part of it too.
But you'll get none of it if today, again, you only read.
Flour, water, salt. A bowl. Begin.
We, Seb and Maik, are building bakeqee right now, a notebook and progress tracker where you can record your bakes, so you don't start from scratch again next time. We're doing it because we both, at some point, got annoyed that weeks later we no longer knew what we'd done and why.
