The Sourdough Sidekick automates the boring little bit of baking

Baking sourdough bread is inherently old school, counting on pure fermentation and wild yeast as a substitute of the straightforward, predictable industrial stuff. So it’d sound anathema to carry a gadget into the combo.

The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick — backed and branded by King Arthur flour — is that it guarantees to automate the boring little bit of sourdough baking: starter administration. It feeds your starter flour and water on a set schedule, prepared for precisely while you wish to bake, leaving you to give attention to kneading, shaping, and the precise baking.

Like any single-purpose kitchen gadget, you’ll need to be assured you’ll get sufficient use to justify each the associated fee and the counter area. That’s doubly true right here thanks to a couple design quirks that make the Sourdough Sidekick irritating to make use of when you don’t bake a number of instances per week.

The Sourdough Sidekick is a joint undertaking by FirstBuild — the GE Appliances “innovation hub” liable for the viral Opal ice maker — and King Arthur Baking Company, which is why you’ll see the latter’s brand on the entrance. It launched with a crowdfunding marketing campaign in March 2025, but it surely’s now available for purchase immediately from King Arthur for $179.99 — although it’s US-only.

The fundamental operation is fairly easy. You drop a small quantity of present starter into the crock — 15g, or a tablespoon’s value — and fill the 2 dispensers with flour and water. On Auto mode, you then inform the Sidekick while you wish to make bread, and the way a lot starter you’ll want to your recipe, and it’ll drip-feed flour and water on a dynamic schedule that takes under consideration the native temperature, mixing because it goes, in order that you find yourself with the correct quantity of starter, at its peak of exercise, proper while you want it.

Using a easy white bread flour, this labored a deal with. I instructed the Sidekick I needed to bake in just a few days’ time, left it alone, and got here again to seek out my starter sturdy, wholesome, and able to bake a reasonably first rate white loaf. If something my bread got here out overproofed, suggesting the Sidekick produced a extra energetic starter than I often handle on my own.

You don’t have to make use of white flour, although any time you turn flours, you’ll need to spend a couple of minutes recalibrating the Sidekick to account for the totally different densities. It dealt with most entire wheat and rye flours simply effective, although after I tried an particularly coarse-milled rye flour from British miller Landrace for a dense Danish-style rye loaf, the ensuing starter proved too thick for the Sidekick to combine correctly, leaving me with dry clumps and skinny patches. The starter wanted extra water to succeed in the appropriate texture, however for that I wanted to go away the pointedly easy Auto mode.

Auto mode has just a few different limitations. It’s designed to work with precisely 15g of starter to start with, so that you’ll need to weigh that out each time to get the proportions proper. More annoyingly, it has odd limits to the minimal quantity of starter it’s prepared to make. Set a bake day just a few days out and it’ll allow you to produce as little as 150g, however goal for 4 days or longer and it insists on making no less than 400g. That’s way over I often use in a single loaf, leading to way more discard (extra starter you gained’t use to bake) than my guide feeding ever creates.

There’s no choice to set the Sidekick into an Auto upkeep mode. You have to set a bake day, and that has to be throughout the subsequent week. That’s nice if you recognize you’ll be baking quickly and when. But typically I simply wish to hold my starter alive and don’t know for positive after I’ll subsequent want a loaf of bread. In that case, you both need to set an arbitrary goal date and let it create some discard, or pull the primary crock out of the machine, pop the lid on, and stick the entire thing within the fridge for just a few days.

The Sidekick has two different modes, Ratio and Custom, that are somewhat extra versatile. While Auto feeds your starter with flour and water at a 1:1:1 ratio, Ratio mode provides you just a few preset ratios to choose from and allows you to set the starter seed quantity and the feeding frequency. The odd limitation is that the set ratios solely differ the proportion of starter relative to the opposite substances. Ratio mode doesn’t allow you to add unequal quantities of flour and water to make a starter that’s both thicker or thinner than regular — precisely what I wanted for my coarse rye flour.

For that you just want Custom mode. This permits you to set the seed quantity, the feeding frequency, and the precise portions of flour and water you need at every feed. I used to be in a position to make use of it to make a barely looser starter for my rye, skinny sufficient for the Sidekick to fortunately combine, and it ought to be potential to make use of it to create a customized upkeep mode with micro-feeds. FirstBuild additionally supplies directions for utilizing Custom to make a starter from scratch — I managed to get a wholesome new starter up and working in 4 days — or rehab one which’s on its final legs. Just be aware that neither Ratio nor Custom mode take into consideration the ambient temperature, in contrast to Auto, so gained’t regulate the feeding schedule if it’s particularly heat or cool, and also you’ll have to watch how energetic your starter is your self.

The Sidekick isn’t actually a wise residence gadget. There is a Wi-Fi possibility and an app, however they’re straightforward to disregard. The app will ship notifications when your starter is able to use or discard must be eliminated, however the built-in display does that too. Otherwise the app permits you to examine the Sidekick’s present settings, however not change them. There’s little compelling purpose to make use of it.

FirstBuild recommends that you just clear the glass crock, lid, and paddle between each feeding cycle to forestall unwelcome buildup. It is smart, however the crock and lid aren’t dishwasher-safe, so that you’ll have to scrub these by hand. Less ceaselessly, you’re really useful to scrub the water tank and flour hopper, however these no less than could be popped into the dishwasher.

The Sidekick can also be oddly noisy. By default, it stirs the starter as soon as each two hours, which entails 30 seconds of loud whirring every time. Since it’ll seemingly be in your kitchen, that’s most likely effective, however in a small area like a studio condo, it’d get in your nerves.

I can’t see myself shopping for the Sourdough Sidekick, however that’s largely me. My kitchen is just too small to justify single-purpose home equipment (espresso machine excepted), and my fiancée is counting down the times till she will reclaim the counter area and eliminate the blending sounds each two hours.

I additionally don’t bake sufficient to get essentially the most out of it. I make one loaf per week at most and often much less. I’d be taking my starter out and in of the Sidekick on the common, most likely manually feeding it between weeks within the fridge, shedding half the advantage of having it within the first place.

But if I had an even bigger kitchen and baked twice per week? I think I’d be blissful to personal a tool that takes care of the one little bit of baking I don’t actually look after. And I suppose my accomplice would simply need to make her peace with the noise.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge