Brian Smith Lincolnton | He Keeps a Notebook for Every Loaf. Here's What It Says.
There are more than two hundred entries after that one. They are written in the same even hand Smith uses at work, in a spiral notebook he bought at a drugstore and has never seen a reason to replace.
The Logic Behind the Log
Brian Smith of Lincolnton, North Carolina is a payroll and benefits administrator for the Lincoln County school system. For more than twenty years, his job has been making sure numbers hold. When he started baking sourdough in the spring of 2020, he brought the same instinct to the kitchen.
The notebook tracks ambient temperature, hydration percentage, bulk fermentation time, oven temperature, and a notes column for what he would change next time. There is almost always something in the notes column.
He does not call this precision baking. He calls it not being willing to make the same mistake twice. The distinction matters to him, because precision implies a goal of perfection. What the notebook actually does is document the distance between where he is and where he is trying to be.
Three Doorstops
The starter came from a King Arthur Flour printout. Smith named it Clyde, after his grandfather Houser. The first three loaves were what he describes, without much affection, as doorstops with delusions of grandeur.
The first was underproofed. He overcorrected, and the second was overproofed. The third had a good crust and a dense crumb. He wrote down what was different about each one and kept going.
By fall of 2020, Smith was turning out a loaf he would hand to someone without apology. By 2022, he had a regular crowd: older neighbors from his church, coworkers at the Lincoln County central office, and a neighbor down the road who trades fresh eggs for bread. None of them knew he had spent six months making bricks to get there.
What the Numbers Actually Tell You
The notebook is not a recipe. There is no single formula on any of its pages, and that is the point. A kitchen in January behaves differently than a kitchen in August. Clyde responds differently depending on when he was last fed and how warm the room is.
What the notebook gives Smith is a record of what worked in this kitchen, with this starter, in these specific conditions. He can look back three months and find the bulk ferment that produced his best crumb. He can find the batch that collapsed and read exactly what was different that day.
Over five years, the notebook has become a map of his kitchen across all four seasons. He knows what the kitchen does to fermentation in December, what it does in July, and how to compensate in both directions. No recipe he has ever read provided that.
The Opinions
Five years and more than two hundred batches in, Brian Smith of Lincolnton has developed a few positions that he holds without apology.
He believes most home bakers over-proof their dough. The window between properly fermented and overproofed is narrower than most recipes suggest, and the only way to find it is to pay attention and write down what you observed.
He believes expensive equipment is largely beside the point. He bakes in a $30 cast-iron combo cooker from a discount store. His crust, by the consistent account of anyone who eats his bread, is exceptional. He has never been able to identify what a $400 Dutch oven would do differently.
He believes sourdough rewards attention more than effort. You cannot force fermentation. What you can do is learn to read the dough, and the notebook is what teaches you to read it.
The most recent entry in the notebook is from last Saturday. Batch 247. Ambient: 71 degrees. Hydration: 78 percent. Bulk: five and a half hours. Assessment: good ear.
A good ear means the loaf sprang well in the oven and developed a clean ridge along the score line. Two of those loaves went to the central office on Friday. One went to a neighbor down the road. The fourth stayed home.
The notebook is already open to a new page. There will be a batch 248. He will write down the temperature.
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