The Opinionated Baker's

Bread Lab

An iPhone app for serious bakers

The book teaches you how to think like a baker. The app helps you work like one.

Every bread you log makes the next one better.

It holds your formulas, tracks your flours, runs the arithmetic, walks the decisions of a bake with you, and stores the photograph of the finished loaf next to the formula that produced it.

Before, during, and after the bake

Plan. Bake. Troubleshoot. Learn.

1

Plan

Explore and plan everything the night before: choose the formula, build the levain, let the app run the math, set the schedule, and arm the reminders so you're ready to bake in the morning.

2

Bake

On bake day: follow the plan step by step from first mix to oven to cooling rack, keeping the timers and temperatures in view, and recording what actually happened in words, numbers, and photos along the way.

3

Troubleshoot

Get calm, situation-specific help when something looks or feels wrong. The app considers your formula, schedule, temperatures, timers, and observations, so its guidance is grounded in what actually happened, not generic advice or guesswork.

4

Learn

Every bake becomes the baseline for the next one: formulas, photos, and outcomes can be reviewed and compared to your entire bake history, so what you learn today is there when you need it tomorrow.

How it's organized

Bakes. Formulas. Flours & Grains.

Bakes

Where you live when you are baking. Plan a Bake lives here, along with your active sessions and the record of every loaf you have made.

Formulas

Your formula library. Every formula you have created or saved, with its blend, hydration, inoculation, salt, and yield.

Flours & Grains

Your flour and grain library: what you own, what you can buy, and how each one behaves in dough.

“The Lab is not a recipe app. It does not tell you what to bake.”
— From The Sourdough Formula

The heart of the Lab

Plan a Bake with ten guided decisions

A guided planning conversation walks you through ten decisions, one card at a time, and turns your answers into a complete bake plan: starter schedule, levain build, formula, process sequence, and all the math. Every card shows the recommended default and explains why. Accept the defaults and you get a solid bake; adjust them and the whole plan recalculates.

  1. 1Starting pointChoose a saved formula, build a blend, or use the house default.
  2. 2Starter readinessDecide how many feeds your starter needs before the levain.
  3. 3Levain timingSet when it should peak, then choose ratio and temperature.
  4. 4Flour and doughChoose the bread, its flour blend, and its intended character.
  5. 5HydrationSet how much water this particular flour blend can carry.
  6. 6Fermentation rhythmChoose the inoculation, dough temperature, and bulk window.
  7. 7Mix methodChoose autolyse, fermentolyse, or mix everything at once.
  8. 8Strength workPlan the folds and lamination that will build structure.
  9. 9Batch sizeSet the main flour weight and number of loaves.
  10. 10Ready to bakeReview the complete plan before you start the bake.

Why I built it

“So I built the tool I wanted and needed but could never find.”
— From The Sourdough Formula

Bread Lab brings the planning, arithmetic, guidance, observations, photographs, and finished results of a bake into one continuous record—so today's bread can teach tomorrow's baker.

Coming December 2026

Built for iPhone. The App Store link will appear here at launch.

App Store — coming December 2026