Sourdough Home: A Starter Proofer & Cooler
- Quiet, electric proofer
- Cooler for storing your sourdough starter
- Temperature range 41-122°F (5-50°C)
- Digital display in Fahrenheit or Celsius
- Compact size
- Fits a 1 quart jar
- Recommended by Maurizio Leo
$149.00
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The Home Your Starter Deserves
Precise Temperature Control
Great bread begins with a great starter and when it comes to sourdough starter, temperature is everything! The complex mix of microbes that cause bread to rise (and give your bread a distinctive flavor and aroma) are extremely sensitive to their environment. The Sourdough Home provides an easy way to precisely control the behavior of your starter. With degree-by-degree control from 41-122°F (5-50°C) you can maintain a consistent temperature or vary it to control the growth rate, aroma, and flavor of your bread. You can switch the temperature display from Fahrenheit to Celsius.
The inside of the proofer measures 5-1/8" x 5.5" x 7.5" which allows a 1 quart jar or two smaller jars to fit inside. Two shelves are included for flexible storage of small items.
As acclaimed sourdough baker Maurizio Leo from the Perfect Loaf blog explains in the video above "It's important that a sourdough starter is maintained in a consistent way, but the challenge there is that the temperature in your kitchen, even from one side of the kitchen to the other, can vary quite drastically... one of the great things about the Sourdough Home is that it allows you to effortlessly dial in the temperature that you want to keep your sourdough starter at."
Offers Flexibility
The Sourdough Home by Brod & Taylor offers a convenient, quiet, and compact way to maintain the temperature of your sourdough starter at the exact temperature you want to keep it at, whether that's a warm environment as you're preparing to bake with it, or a cool environment if you want to store it between bakes. The Sourdough Home both cools and heats, so you have total flexibility with how often you want to feed your starter, whether that's twice a day or once a week, or anywhere in between.
Sourdough starter maintenance
Sourdough starter is a living colony of yeast and good bacteria. Like any living thing it needs to eat—just flour and water. Feeding your starter the proper ingredients at the right time is the first step in creating great sourdough bread. Using the precise temperature control of the Sourdough Home, you can adjust starter feeding times to meet your schedule.
As starter ferments and grows, it creates CO2 bubbles that cause the mixture to rise in its container. The ideal time to feed starter is when the rise has peaked—all of its food has been consumed—and before it begins to fall again. By using a constant seed ratio (quantity of flour and water) and controlling the temperature, you can control the feeding schedule to hours, days or even a week. Use the guidelines below to get started.
About Brod & Taylor
In a small town in Western Massachusetts, Brod & Taylor was founded on a passion for making wholesome food from scratch. Their products transform this often challenging process into a simple pleasure by blending innovative design with simplicity, affordability, and outstanding customer support.
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The Perfect Loaf is the first baking book by Maurizio Leo and it's a dynamic, authoritative sourdough bible for those looking to build confidence in the craft with a wide range of foolproof recipes, from pan loaves to pizza to doughnuts.
Maurizio Leo’s blog The Perfect Loaf is the go-to destination on the internet for beginner sourdough bakers. He now brings his impeccably detailed techniques, foolproof recipes, and generous teaching style to a groundbreaking debut cookbook that delves into the absolute fundamentals of sourdough—plus the tools and confidence to explore beyond.
Maurizio has spent 10+ years discovering how to bake delicious and healthy sourdough bread in the home kitchen, and now it's all in his book. This book will help you become a better baker!
60 recipes cover flavorful, crowd-pleasing favorites, including...
Beginner bakers will have their hands held the entire way, with troubleshooting sections and numerous sidebars answering almost every question they may have—like how to store a sourdough starter long-term, how bakers’ percentages actually work, and a visual guide to common “bread fails” and how to remedy them. Seasoned bakers will relish deep dives into the science behind baking processes and expert information on how to build their “baker’s intuition” and level up by experimenting with hydration, ingredient ratios, freshly milled grains, and specialty flours. Whether you’re new to bread baking or a pro, The Perfect Loaf will be your indispensable guide in the kitchen.
“Maurizio Leo has given all bread-heads, whether newbies or experienced bakers, the ideal gift.” —Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and host of Pizza Quest
“There is no book written specifically for home bakers that surpasses this one.”—Jeffrey Hamelman, baker and author of Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes
“It’s like a textbook you use at a late-night study session, then realize you’re enjoying it so much that it becomes bedtime reading.” —WIRED
Maurizio Leo is a home baker and the creator of the award-winning sourdough website, The Perfect Loaf. He's currently the Resident Bread Baker at Food52 and a regular contributor to the King Arthur Baking blog. His articles and recipes on bread baking have appeared in Edible New Mexico, the Bread Baker's Guild of America, and Bread Magazine. He holds a master's degree in computer science, is a co-creator of the award-winning stargazing app SkyView, and has spent the past decade baking sourdough bread in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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1 - 10 of 23 reviews
In a home environment and even in some commercial environments, it's quite difficult to control all the variables related to proper fermentation (of anything, really). Control of variables leads to consistency of results as well as the ability to drill down and tweak one variable at a time when experimenting or "tinkering with your dough" as Peter Reinhart and others like to say. For those who are interested in control and don't already have or have room for a larger proofer/retarder, this little thing is great for controlling the growth and balance of your starter.
There is some off-gassing of the product at first use. I let the unit sit unplugged with the door open for a couple of hours and then with the unit on for another hour with the temp set close to the current room temp and the smell dissipated.
It's a bit lighter than I imagined it would be and I find myself needing two hands to open it without it sliding. Will probably add some rubber or grippy feet to it (most likely an issue with my countertop surface and not the unit).
A lot of the baking I do is sourdough and have had issues with maintaining lower temperatures for longer ferments. I already had one Sourdough Home and decided to buy a second one so that I can maintain my starter while using the second when needing a higher temps. I keep one at 45 and the other at 65 or higher depending on what I will be baking.
As others have said, it is a game changer for consistency in temperatures. My wife isn’t too pleased with all of my gadgets but she doesn’t complain about the quality of the baking.
I'm thrilled to have this "happy home" for my starter. This product has really upped my bread making to a brand new level. Knowing that sourdough is very sensitive to temp variations like countertop to refrigerator care, not to mention seasonal changes, I decided to investigate this product. After much research, I decided to pull the trigger. And I'm glad I did ! Not only is my starter happy and vigorous but I can now make bread on my own schedule.
What's not to love?!
I figure it's cheaper to use the Sourdough Home to control a small environment with the optimal temperature than to turn up the heat when I'm trying to keep my utility costs down. With gas appliances going out of political favor (ahem), pilot lights might become few and far between. The Sourdough Home is the right appliance at the right time.
Having used a B&T proofing box for a year and been very happy with that, I jumped on getting a Sourdough Home as soon as it was announced. It arrived a week ago and I immediately plugged it in, set the temperature and loaded my starter inside. I noticed a hot plastic smell later, but thought it was just new and ignored it until the next morning, when I noticed I still smelled it. Opening the door, I realized it was much hotter than the 50 degrees I had set it at. I got out my IR thermometer and scanned the unit to find it over 100 degrees. I shut it off and restarted it after removing my starter, wanting to try and diagnose what went wrong. I also emailed Brod & Taylor about the problem, but since it was Saturday morning, figured I wouldn't hear back from them until the following week.
In less than two hours, I had a reply email from B&T wanting any information I could provide and saying they would replace the unit at once and wanted the bad one for their techs to check out. After restarting the unit, it ran perfectly and using my quality test equipment, I can say it maintained the temperature very accurately. I also traded emails with B&T several times providing all the information I could and promising to return the unit so they can figure out what went wrong with it.
I had a new replacement from them in two days and the return label to ship back the defective unit. For some reason, that one had failed to switch from heating to cooling when first plugged in, but ran perfectly for two more days after turning it off and on again. The new unit has also run perfectly, maintaining the temperature within a half degree of the set point the two days it has now been running virtually silently and this time without any hot smell.
Bottom line, I think this will be a great unit and as with the proofer, B&T has made another great appliance. Pleasant Hill Grain has been a great source for appliances and grains and I can now say that customer support from B&T is off-the-charts great too! I definitely recommend both the proofer and this new Sourdough Home.
Really helpful product to promote starter health by keeping it a steady temperature. Only then can feeding routines be maintained consistently. Wish B&T would make a large version!
It seems to keep my starter well. My kitchen is constantly changing temperature this unit does a great job so far.
The sourdough Home Starter proofer is an amazing device, and truly a game changer for having aconsistent temperature during the starter development and Levan stages. I bake sourdough bread every two weeks or so and have come to appreciate the accuracy of the devlice. The Sourdough Home unit removes any guesswork when preparing sourdough bread. Truly a game changer for sourdough bread preparation.
Works great!! My wife was having trouble finding a warm spot in the house for her starter. This solved the problem, use it every day!!
I’m new to sourdough but the sourdough home has made keeping my starter easy! Wonderful product and easy to use especially for a beginner. Highly recommend.
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