Breadpilled: Adventures in Craftsmanship
What sourdough taught me about intuition (and, fine, B2B sales)
Because I love being five years late to trends, I recently took up everyone’s pandemic hobby: sourdough bread baking. I bought myself a butter keeper that looks like a mushroom (because I am also ridiculous and whimsical) and a girlfriend of mine took this as a sign to dehydrate part of her sourdough starter and mail it to me all the way across the country.
Gulp. Time to become a wannabe Tartine baker. Game on.
I wanted to wing it. Look up some information here and there, watch a NYT Cooking video, ask ChatGPT advice along the way, and mostly just vibe with it. Sourdough enthusiasts often rave about how “easy” it is to make and I figure, if it’s so easy, couldn’t you just figure it out along the way?
After a day or two of rehydration, my quarter-cup of sourdough starter, dubbed JJ, was bubbly and sticky and smelled like hard cider. On day 12, I scooped up the goopy JJ, mixed her with flour, water and salt, and then fermented, shaped, proofed, and baked my first loaf. Slightly under-fermented, but golden, blistered, and spongey.
I was hooked. Breadpilled, if you will. At this point, I had spent $150 on supplies — a proper starter jar with temperature gauge; a cast iron Dutch oven specifically for batard (in pink, duh); a pair of bannetons for proofing dough; beeswax-and-cotton bread bags to store my loaves; and a Saint Germain lame (it’s pronounced “lahm,” you heathens) to slash the top of my cold dough right before baking. All you have to do is make 20 loaves and you’ll break even, I told myself. (Follow me for more personal finance hacks.)
As I type this, I have another loaf in the oven and a bowl of starter set aside to form two more loaves tonight. Once-sticky globs of starter have cemented onto my kitchen counter and the inside lid of my trash cans. Various measuring bowls and spatulas are soaking in soapy water in and around the sink. The other day, when I left for a business trip, I anxiously texted my husband, “Can you move JJ to my office where it’s warmer?” Every conversation with me has become insufferable. My husband reminded me of a few events on our calendar this week and I nodded solemnly, “Did you know you can keep a starter alive forever? Some people have starter passed down from generations, over a hundred years old.”
There’s just nothing like finding a new hobby. Something that occupies your mind during every idle moment. Thinking of all the little ways it can change your life. I’ll never have to buy sourdough again! This is basically free probiotics for the whole family! Has anyone ever made a chocolate loaf, am I a genius for thinking of that, and will I be the one who invents it? (No, chocolate sourdough is already very much a thing.)
Right now, I’m still in the honeymoon phase, where every tool purchase feels like moving up a belt and every loaf feels like proof that this is my new calling, that I’m bound to become a craftsperson. Tartine, here I come.
But sourdough-making is craftsmanship, and the first lesson is that you have a long road ahead. You can be diligent with giving your dough a whole 12 hours of rest and still get punished with an under-fermented loaf. You can be lazy, forget your third stretch & fold, and still get lucky with a hole-y inside. You can make a bunch of little mistakes and end up with decent bread. Or you can make one crucial error that ruins the crumb entirely.
Which is, annoyingly, the point.
Craft asks for your attention, not your identity. It doesn’t care that you bought the Saint Germain lame, especially when you can just use a sharp paring knife. It asks if you can notice what’s happening. If you’re taking notes. If you can reassess your plan instead of getting defensive when the dough tells you the truth (what do you mean 10 hours of fermentation isn’t enough when your room is 68 degrees?!).
But this is the fun part of being a beginner. The repeating middle, where mastery is just reps stacked on reps, done without the audience. One crusty, chewy loaf at a time.
Eventually I won’t need to dust my phone with flour to rewatch the last five minutes of that NYT Cooking video; I’ll know what properly proofed dough should look like. Eventually I’ll feed JJ because I know she needs it, not because my calendar told me to.
When I first typed out the subheadline of this piece, I was joking about the B2B sales lesson. But there is a lesson, and it’s simpler: craftsmanship is learned intuition.
It’s what happens when you stack enough reps that you can feel “ready” in your hands before you can fully explain it in words. When you’ve watched dough go slack and sticky, then elastic and alive. When you’ve made enough small adjustments that you can improvise as a reflex. At some point, you stop asking the internet what to do, and you just look at the dough. Trust the (fermentation) process.
(And fine. If you squint, that’s also B2B sales.)
🍪 Other things I’m chewing on
🤖 Good marketing takes a side: I heard a lot about Claude’s Super Bowl ads (hyuk hyuk, running ads to announce they’re not running an ads) and was amused by Sam Altman’s response. (It’s ok to laugh, homie.) It’s a good micro-lesson in marketing because effective marketing chooses a philosophical enemy — it takes your side. Well, “your” side if you’re the one the ad resonates with. Sonia Baschez and Jiya Jaisingh talked about this on this week’s Meme Team podcast. Be sure to give that a listen!
🔎 A guide to agentic commerce: The last decade rewarded marketing arbitrage; the next one rewards product truth. As AI agents compress the multi-click shopping journey into 1-2 interactions, your website matters less as a destination and more as a structured database that agents can query. In this thorough article, Kevin Indig breaks down the emerging protocol landscape (OpenAI’s ACP vs Google’s UCP), the new tradeoffs for merchants (distribution vs owning the customer relationship), and why “SEO” starts looking a lot more like feed integrity and verification than landing-page tweaks.
🫣 I was named a LinkedIn Top Voice! Bragging is kinda lame, I know, but this was an unexpected surprise and I was pumped to see this last week. If you aren’t already, follow your gal on LinkedIn?