If you’ve ever wanted to get into sourdough baking, it’s best to start on the right foot with some help from the experts. For that, there are many sourdough bread apps vying for your love and your hard-won dollar.
We’re here to pare the rest away, leaving you with only the finest on the market. It’s the yeast we could do.
1. Rise
Rise is an iOS-based sourdough app. This charming sourdough bread baking journal app includes everything that you need and everything that you’re going to have to do in order to bake your best boule yet.
If you’ve ever baked sourdough before, you already know that doing it from scratch can be kind of a long haul, especially at first, as you work to establish your own homemade sourdough starter. Levains, bulk fermentation, and proof times are all demystified here. For those just getting into a weekly sourdough hobby, there is no better place to start.
Download: Rise (Free, in-app purchases available)
2. Home Bread Recipe
Home Bread Recipe is a sourdough calculator app that comes complete with a full-color, illustrated UI that lets you easily choose exactly what you want to bake.
This sourdough calculator takes things like the volume distribution of a baguette and adjusts the recipe according to this and other preferences—flour type or different types of yeast leavening agents, for example. It even includes instructions for things like adding a tangzhong flour roux to your loaf, or for creating an enriched brioche, if you’re feeling particularly fancy.
We love Home Bread Recipe because it totally blows the lid off of sourdough concepts like hydration level and other head-scratchers that aren’t exactly intuitive at first.
You’re free to tweak, scale, and modify any of the recipes found here using Pro Mode. Many features are locked behind a paywall, but you can bake to your heart’s content under the free version’s custom recipe limit.
Download: Home Bread Recipe (Free, in-app purchases available)
3. Sourdough Hydration Calculator
Are you a home baker plagued eternally by a dry, tight crumb or an incomplete second rise? Fear not. Sourdough Hydration Calculator is the sourdough recipe converter that you never knew you needed. There are no ads or extra features. This app does one thing only, but it does it well.
This sourdough calculator app allows you to triangulate the exact hydration of any combination of sourdough ingredients, all thanks to a short menu of slider controls. It’ll spit out the resulting stats, translating even your grandma’s most archaic recipe card from the vault into a ball of dough you’ll be able to reckon with logically.
Sourdough recipe conversion applies not only to halving or doubling a recipe; as mentioned previously, things like hydration in sourdough baking are also key physical factors that will make or break your bake.
With this sourdough calculator, you can adjust the ratio of any ingredient, the recipe’s hydration levels laid out clearly and plainly, updating as you go. You’ll even have your final loaf weight both before and after baking.
Download: Sourdough Hydration Calculator for Android | iOS (Free)
4. Crumb
Crumb is a bread-baking app for advanced sourdough artisans who already have a few go-to recipes as part of their wellness baking rotation. If you already know how long your ideal autolyze fermentation requires, Crumb steps in readily as a neat and convenient way to plan out your baking days.
Once you’ve got your entire routine in place and ready, you can refer to this information whenever you need to. There’s even a handy note-taking feature that you can use to amend each sourdough recipe with updates or fun variations.
The interface is beyond minimal—no ads, no-nonsense, just you, the boule, and the bench. If you bake sourdough specifically for a fresh slice of toast on the morning of, Crumb ensures that your loaf will never be late to the table again. It’s a great baking journal app, through and through.
Download: Crumb (Free)
5. Bread Scheduler
This simple app is your all-in-one sourdough timing app of reference for the entire sourdough baking process, from front to back. For a straightforward day of baking in a classy and attractive package, few bread-making apps deliver a Martha Stewart experience like this one.
Bread Scheduler is perfect for baking beginners who just need instructions to follow with no fancy math or ratio conversions required.
Many of the recipes (including the Bread Scheduler recipe for a foolproof sourdough starter, which includes a formula and feeding schedule) are also available on the website. For full, integrated access to all of this app’s native bread timing features, however, downloading the app puts them all at your fingertips.
Download: Bread Scheduler (Free)
6. Breadwinner
Breadwinner is a web app, but it’s mobile-compatible and too unique not to include in this list. Not only is the free site an incredible resource for all things sourdough baking, but it’s also a vibrant online community of bakers on the rise—no pun intended.
That’s hardly the extent of what the site offers, however.
The coolest innovation you’ll find here: a beta program to test the prototype of Breadwinner’s starter tracking device. It’s a physical lid that reads your starter’s activity levels by monitoring its CO2 output.
When this hardware hits the streets, you’ll be able to know exactly when the sourdough culture housed within is hungry for a feeding or at its leavening peak, all from your smartphone or tablet.
Social features include logging your starters and sourdough bakes and sharing photos, recipes, and ratings to help others on the platform. You’re free to use what others share, too; everything on the site is raw, uncensored, and totally authentic to the reality of bread-baking.
Sourdough Apps for Baking: Beginners, Rejoice
In sourdough baking, there are so many things capable of spoiling the show—the bulk fermentation period was too short, the oven was too hot, or the flour wasn’t strong enough to lift the weight of the water in your dough.
It’s a lot of science, but if you’ve got a winning recipe and you’re following it to a T, there is nothing stopping you from baking the best piece of bread you’ve ever eaten in your life.
If you just can’t seem to get your boule off of the ground, many of the apps above provide shining examples of what to do and what to expect when baking bread at home for the first time.
