Brian Smith Lincolnton | A Country Loaf Is Harder Than It Looks. Ask the Guy Who Made Three Bricks.

Brian Smith of Lincolnton, North Carolina made three inedible loaves before he made anything worth keeping. He describes them, without much warmth, as doorstops with delusions of grandeur.

He says this upfront now, whenever someone tells him they tried sourdough once and gave up. The failure is part of the process. The question is whether you write down what happened and do it again.

Why Sourdough Is Harder Than Yeast Bread

Commercial yeast is predictable. You add it to warm water, it activates in a known time range, and it does what yeast does. The variables are limited and the feedback is fast.

Sourdough starter is a living culture of wild yeast and bacteria that behaves differently depending on temperature, feeding schedule, flour type, hydration, and the ambient conditions of the specific kitchen it lives in. Every one of these variables can affect the outcome independently, and they interact in ways that take time to understand.

Smith's first three months were spent understanding what the variables even were. His first three loaves were the cost of that education. He has never described them as wasted effort, because the notebook entries from that period are some of the most instructive he has.

What the Failures Looked Like

Loaf one: underproofed. It looked right in the basket and came out of the oven dense all the way through. The crust was fine. Everything below it was not.

Loaf two: overproofed. He overcorrected and let the bulk ferment run too long. The dough spread when he turned it out. He baked it anyway. It was flat.

Loaf three: scored incorrectly. He did not cut at the right angle or with enough confidence, and the bread blew out on the side rather than opening along the score line. The crumb was actually better that time. He could not tell from the outside. He cut it and wrote down what he found.

What Turned It Around

The notebook helped, though not immediately. By the end of the first summer Smith had enough entries to start seeing patterns. He could look at a batch and make a reasonable prediction, based on what the dough felt like going into the cooker, about what the crumb would be.

The starter stabilizing helped more. Edward, named after his grandfather Houser, was inconsistent in the early months because Smith was still learning how to feed him reliably. Once the feeding schedule became automatic, the starter became a known quantity, and isolating the other variables became possible.

By fall of 2020, Brian Smith of Lincolnton was making a loaf he would describe, honestly, as genuinely good. Not professional. Not perfect. Good enough to give to people who came back for more.

Why He Thinks Anyone Can Do This

Smith is not a professional baker and did not come to sourdough with any prior experience beyond watching his grandmother make biscuits by feel when he was a child. He came to it through a pandemic and a printout and a willingness to keep a notebook.

What he had was the ability to write down what went wrong and try again the following weekend. That, plus a starter that survived two near-death experiences and a kitchen he came to understand over five years, turned out to be enough.

He believes the country loaf is accessible to anyone willing to be wrong about it for a few months and keep going anyway. The bread is not the hard part. The patience to make it badly enough times to start making it well, that is what it actually costs.

The loaf he makes now has a crust that shatters when you cut it and a crumb with irregular holes that close evenly. People eat it and say it tastes like real bread. He takes this as a compliment.

It took more than forty batches to get there. The doorstops are still in the notebook.

The notebook in his kitchen is on its third volume. The first two are in a box in the hall closet. He has not re-read them cover to cover, but he knows they are there. They are the record of everything that did not go the way it was supposed to, and what he learned from it.

Both notebooks have the same job. They make the work better. That is what notebooks are for.