#1 Timing Is Everything — Why We're Obsessed With Predicting Fermentation Peaks

If you've baked with a sourdough starter, you've been there.

You fed your starter, watched it climb, thought it was ready — and either caught it just past its peak or jumped the gun and used it too early. The result: a loaf that didn't rise the way it should. Too dense, too sour, or just...off.

Timing is everything in fermentation.

The problem is that nailing that timing is genuinely hard.

Your starter behaves differently when the weather changes, and even with the same recipe, it never quite acts the same way twice.

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What We're Trying to Build

For the past several months, our team has been focused on one question:

"Can we predict when your starter will peak — before it actually gets there?"

Not a timer. Not a generic reminder. We want to read what's happening in real time and give you an actual predicted peak time — one that's grounded in what your specific starter is doing right now, in your kitchen, on that particular day.

To build that, we needed data. Fortunately, we had real fermentation sessions recorded by SourFriend.

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What We Found When We Looked Closely

Honestly, the data was more complex than we expected when we first dug in.

Fermentation is a biological process with a lot of moving parts — starter health, kitchen temperature, flour ratios, timing. Out of 100+ sessions, no two fermentation curves looked exactly the same.

But the deeper we looked, the more patterns emerged.

There are broadly three types of fermentation — fast, medium, and slow — and regardless of type, they all follow the same underlying rhythm. And that rhythm starts signaling what it's going to do within the first two hours.

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What's Coming in This Series

Over the next few posts, we'll share what the data revealed.

We'll keep it accessible — no jargon, just what we found translated into something that actually matters for people who care about fermentation.