Flour, Water, Salt, GitHub: the Bread Code is a Sourdough Baking Framework

upstart writes:

My year of baking lessons, guided by a full-stack engineer who teaches patience:

One year ago, I didn't know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe.

If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change-temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio-I'd turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and they were polite, but those platters were not particularly palatable.

During a group vacation last year, a friend made fresh sourdough loaves every day, and we devoured it. He gladly shared his knowledge, his starter, and his go-to recipe. I took it home, tried it out, and made a naturally leavened, artisanal pancake.

I took my confusion to YouTube, where I found Hendrik Kleinwachter's "The Bread Code" channel and his video promising a course on "Your First Sourdough Bread." I watched and learned a lot, but I couldn't quite translate 30 minutes of intensive couch time to hours of mixing, raising, slicing, and baking. Pancakes, part three.

It felt like there had to be more to this. And there was-a whole GitHub repository more.

[...] The Bread Code is centered around a book, The Sourdough Framework.It's an open source codebase that self-compiles into new LaTeX book editions and is free to read online. It has one real bread loaf recipe, if you can call a 68-page middle-section journey a recipe. It has 17 flowcharts, 15 tables, and dozens of timelines, process illustrations, and photos of sourdough going both well and terribly. Like any cookbook, there's a bit about Kleinwachter's history with this food, and some sourdough bread history. Then the reader is dropped straight into "How Sourdough Works," which is in no way a summary.

[...] I have found myself very grateful lately that Kleinwachter did not find success with 30-minute YouTube tutorials. Strangely, so has he.

"I have had some successful startups; I have also had disastrous startups," Kleinwachter said in an interview. "I have made some money, then I've been poor again. I've done so many things."

Most of those things involve software. Kleinwachter is a German full-stack engineer, and he has founded firms and worked at companies related to blogging, e-commerce, food ordering, travel, and health. He tried to escape the boom-bust startup cycle by starting his own digital agency before one of his products was acquired by hotel booking firm Trivago. After that, he needed a break-and he could afford to take one.

"I went to Naples, worked there in a pizzeria for a week, and just figured out, 'What do I want to do with my life?' And I found my passion. My passion is to teach people how to make amazing bread and pizza at home," Kleinwachter said.

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