Sourdough Baby

A starter spends most of its life inside a jar, lid on, or pushed to the back of the fridge. You don't know how far it has risen, or how long until it needs feeding — not without walking over and looking.

This app moves it onto your phone.

Give it a name and it lives on your screen as a small creature. Just fed, rising, at peak, or hungry — you can see which at a glance. The home screen widget shows it without unlocking.

■ How it knows what your jar is doing

It calibrates.

Feeding ratio, room temperature, flour — any of these can shift peak time by hours. So the app doesn't hand you a textbook number.

At first it starts from a reference value (about 6 hours for 1:1:1, about 9 for 1:2:2, and so on). You check the jar a few times when prompted, and tap to log the moment it actually crests. From then on, that ratio uses your jar's real data.

The longer you use it, the closer it gets. Countdowns, peak markers, and bake-time math all run on your kitchen's numbers, not someone else's.

A few extra looks early on buys you a lot less guessing later.

■ Starting from scratch, one step at a time

No hunting through blog posts. The steps are ordered and the app walks you through them.

And seven days doesn't automatically mean success. Early on you feed once daily. Only after you see real bubbles and pass the activity check does it move to twice-daily feeding. Then come the doubling tests — double within 6 to 9 hours of a feeding and that counts as one pass. Three passes total, and your starter has genuinely arrived.

Failures don't reset your progress. A slow starter is just slow, not broken.

Worth knowing: around day 3 to 5 the jar often goes quiet, and that's where most people dump it and start over. It's a normal transition, not death. The app tells you what's happening during those days.

■ Already have a starter? Take it straight over

A gift from a friend, one you bought online, that jar that's been in the fridge three months — import it and skip cultivation entirely.

■ Two rhythms, pick what fits your life

Room temperature: feed daily, bake whenever.
Fridge: one cycle a week, with prompts at every step — warm-up, feed, back in the cold.

■ Reminders on your schedule

Timed from the moment you actually finish a feeding, not from a fixed alarm.

■ When something looks wrong

The Health Centre is organised as Understand it / Care for it / Rescue it. Layer separation, fuzzy growth, an alcohol smell, no rise at all — find the symptom, find the answer.

■ When it's time to bake

Baking calculator: change the ratio or the total, flour and water are worked out for you.
Bake planner: tell it when you want to start mixing, and it works backwards from your own peak data to when you should feed.
Float test: decide whether today's jar is ready.

■ Everything it's been through

The growth diary logs feedings, notes, and photos by day. Scroll back and watch it go from a jar of paste to what you have now.

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To be clear: the app can't detect what's biolo