Breadwinner is the new smart sourdough starter tracker of my dreams.

Sour bread is a difficult thing to get right. but Breadwinner, A new smart gadget in development from hardware designers (and bread lovers) Fred benson

And Sara Pavis, Trying to extract a little secret from yeast by offering a gadget attached to the app, which can track the amount and temperature of your starter and notify you when it’s ready to bake, Via laughing Squid.

If You have never baked with a starter before, this is very different from store-bought yeast. Your starter (mine, if you were curious, is named Lancelot) is fed frequently and continues to rise and fall throughout the day as the yeast feeds on the sugar in the flour and creates bubbles of carbon dioxide – the same bubbles that help you. We do. Your sour bread is sour and tasty.

But find out When There is a tricky balance of art and science to use your starter after a feeding. What the breadwinner aims for is that you can take the equation out of the estimation by tracking the growth of your starter after a feeding and let you know when the peak point starts to mix your dough. It also logs past feedings, allowing you to track your starter’s performance over time and twist the variable to achieve that perfect power.

The breadwinner unit is designed to fit on top of a 16oz ball mason jar, and it works using an infrared sensor to measure starter height. It can also take temperature readings of the surrounding air to ensure that it is not too hot (or too cold), and includes Wi-Fi connectivity to connect to your smartphone. A button at the top lets you easily log in when fed to your starter.

The current model – which costs $ 140 – is in the midst of a public prototype phase. Buying breadwinners today is not buying strongly finished products. The hardware is extremely incomplete, and the current version charges via microUSB, which I expect will be swapped to USB-C for the finished product.

Obviously, this is a lot to spend on any gadget, very little that is still very incomplete and limited in function as this one – but if you are someone who is really looking for bread, gadgets and data If you like analysis, it can be a fun one. In addition to your kitchen.

The breadwinner team also plans to use feedback from early users – and valuable data from a wide variety of starters, flour mixes, and more users from a valuable schedule – to further refine the product before a commercially produced version comes in the future. for. If you want a more sophisticated (or cheaper) product, it may be worth the wait. To sweeten the pot, the prototype also comes with access to a breadwinner discord and a $ 50 rebate of the final model.

Breadwinner It is not about single gadgets though. The site is portrayed as an online community for bread enthusiasts, a self-described “social network for yeast” aimed at posting recipes, sharing bread pictures, and seeking advice from fellow bakers There should be a place for.