Brian Smith of Lincolnton, North Carolina made three inedible loaves before he made anything worth eating. He wants to be clear about this, because the sourdough baking community online tends to present a version of the craft that begins with a few awkward loaves and quickly progresses to open crumb and golden crust. His experience was different. His first three loaves were bricks — dense, gummy, sour in a way that was unpleasant rather than complex, with crusts that did not spring and interiors that did not develop. He threw them away.
This is what he tells people who ask him how to start. He does not tell them it is easy. He tells them what it actually costs, and he thinks they should know before they begin.
What the First Three Loaves Cost Him
The flour: roughly fifteen dollars across three failed batches. The time: about six hours per loaf, spread across two days, for a total of somewhere around eighteen hours of active attention and waiting. The emotional cost: harder to quantify, but real. He had told his wife he was going to figure out sourdough. He had watched the videos. He had bought the scale and the bench scraper and the proofing basket. Then he had produced three dense, unworkable loaves in a row and had to reckon with the possibility that he was simply not good at this.
He kept going anyway. He is not entirely sure why, except that the problem felt solvable — each failed loaf had specific identifiable flaws, and he could see, looking at them, what might have caused each one. The first was almost certainly underproofed. The second overproofed. The third was probably both — he had tried to correct the second mistake in the wrong direction and had created a different problem. But they were different problems. The baking was changing, even if the results were not yet good.
The Fourth Loaf
The fourth loaf was the first one he considered edible. It was not good bread. It was dense in some places and too open in others, with an uneven crumb that suggested the shaping had not been consistent. But it had a crust that crackled when he pressed it. The interior was not gummy. It tasted like sourdough — sour, complex, with the kind of flavor that takes a few bites to fully register.
He ate it with butter at the kitchen counter, standing up, and wrote a note in the spiral notebook he had just started keeping: “First loaf worth eating. Crumb uneven but not dense. Crust OK. Keep going.”
He has that notebook still. The entry is on the fourth page.
Why Anyone Can Do It
Smith bakes a country loaf — a simple formula, mostly bread flour with a small percentage of whole wheat, at around 75 percent hydration. It is not a technically complex bread. It is the bread that most sourdough beginners attempt, and it is the bread that, five years and 200 batches later, he still bakes almost every weekend. He has not graduated to more complex formulas because the country loaf still gives him enough to work on and because it is the loaf people respond to — at the office, at the church drop-offs, in the neighbor’s kitchen.
He thinks anyone can bake this bread. He is serious about this, not in the motivational way that people say it when they mean “most people with effort,” but in the literal way — the formula is simple, the ingredients are inexpensive, the equipment required is minimal, and the failures are instructive rather than opaque. You can see why a loaf went wrong if you are paying attention. You can fix it next time if you write down what happened.
The only thing it genuinely requires is that you keep going past the first three bricks. That part is harder than it sounds, and he does not want to understate it. But it is the whole thing. Keep going past the first three bricks, and the bread will improve. He has the notebook to prove it.
The loaves Smith shares each week — with coworkers, church neighbors, and a neighbor with backyard hens — are described in The People Who Get Free Bread in Lincolnton. The equipment he bakes them in is covered in The $30 Cooker. The $400 Dutch Oven. More at About Brian Smith Lincolnton.