The Summer I Started Keeping Proper Notes (And What I Found When I Looked Back)

There is a specific kind of frustration that every home baker knows. You nail a bake, completely nail it, the kind of loaf you want to photograph before you even slice it, and then three weeks later you cannot remember what you actually did. Different hydration? Extra long rest? You fed the starter earlier than usual? It is all a blur. The bake is gone and so is the method.

That was basically my entire summer last year. I was baking more than ever, partly because long evenings in London lend themselves to it and partly because I had people coming over most weekends and a good loaf is always welcome. But I was also baking in a completely chaotic way. Scraps of notes on my phone. A voice memo I never transcribed. A screenshot of someone else's formula I had tweaked but could not remember how. By August I had baked probably thirty loaves and could confidently replicate about two of them.

The Problem With Baking From Memory

Here is the thing about sourdough in summer. The variables shift constantly. Your kitchen is warmer, your starter moves faster, fermentation runs ahead of where you expect it. A formula that worked perfectly in May behaves differently in July, and if you are not writing things down you end up chasing results you cannot explain. You think you remember what you did. You do not.

I work in tech during the day, and there is a version of this problem in software too. If you change three things at once and something breaks, you have no idea which change caused it. Baking is the same. If you want to actually improve, you need to be able to isolate variables. And you cannot do that from memory, or from a half-finished note you wrote at midnight after a pub session with the lads.

The other issue was formulas themselves. I had been building up a small library of recipes I had adapted over time, different starter percentages, different flour blends, a couple of enriched doughs I was experimenting with. They were scattered across three different apps and a notebook I kept losing. Every time I wanted to scale something up for a bigger bake or adjust for a different loaf tin, I was redoing the maths from scratch.

What Actually Changed

I started using Doughrise Pro properly in the middle of summer, mostly because I was fed up with the mess. The thing that made the biggest difference immediately was being able to save unlimited formulas in one place and pull them up whenever I needed them. Not a screenshot, not a note, an actual structured record with every percentage logged and the ability to scale it properly without reaching for a calculator.

But the part I did not expect to value as much was the bake history. After a few weeks of logging bakes consistently, I started to see patterns I had completely missed. My best summer loaves were all coming in at slightly shorter bulk times than I would have predicted, which made sense once I actually looked at the kitchen temperature notes alongside them. My less successful bakes were clustered around days when I had fed the starter later than usual before mixing. None of this was groundbreaking information, but I could never have seen it without the history laid out in front of me.

There is something quietly satisfying about being able to export a bake record as a PDF and look at three months of work in one go. It is the kind of thing that makes you feel like you are actually getting better at this rather than just baking the same loaf on a loop and hoping for improvement.

A Few Practical Notes From This Summer

Regardless of how you track your bakes, a few things have genuinely helped me get more consistent results through the warmer months.

The bigger shift for me was just accepting that sourdough rewards attention. Not stress, not obsession, just paying enough attention to know what is happening and why. That is hard to do when your notes are a mess. It is much easier when they are not.

Summer is almost done now. I have got a solid record of the last two months of baking, a handful of formulas I am genuinely proud of, and a much clearer picture of what my starter does when the temperature creeps up. Next summer I will not be starting from scratch. That, more than anything, is the point.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by Tommaso Urli on Unsplash