who made
this thing.

My name is Kyle. I garden for a living — actual dirt, actual plants, actual New York City parks and backyards. Before that I spent years building websites for other people. Before that, who knows. The ADHD brain doesn't keep a clean timeline; it just picks up obsessions like shiny rocks and runs with them for months.

The current shiny rock is this. A recipe notebook for sourdough bakers, designed to feel like a field journal, built to function like a database. Hydration ratios, starter genealogies, flour protein percentages, fermentation timelines — the obsessive, nerdy, delightful math that goes into something that is, at its core, just flour and water left out to get interesting.

I'm not a professional baker. I'm not a food blogger. I'm a guy with a starter named Gary, a kitchen in New York, and a mom I call every time I pull something out of the oven — to report in, basically. She's been cooking since before I existed and I'm still trying to catch up.

Some families pass down jewelry. Mine passes down recipes. For as long as I can remember, my mom and I have traded them — measurements yelled across the kitchen, photos texted at strange hours, recipe cards tucked into birthday cards. When I got into sourdough, she was the first person I called. She picked up on the second ring, already had opinions.

Cooking is the language we kept speaking when life got busy. I'd send her a voice note about a gummy crumb at 11 p.m. She'd send back a photo of her starter at 7 a.m. We have made each other better bakers. More to the point, we have made each other.

This site started as the thing those phone calls would look like if we wrote them down. Yes, it's a database — pH levels and protein percentages and all the obsessive bits. But it's also a place to track who taught us what. A place where every recipe has a person attached to it.

I built it with her in mind. And for everyone who has ever traded a recipe with someone they love and realized, somewhere in the middle of explaining bulk fermentation at midnight, that the bread was almost beside the point.

Every baker's starter is its own thing. Same flour, same water, different apartment, different kitchen microbiome, different outcome. Gary tastes like New York in the way everything in New York ends up tasting a little like New York. I'm told this is a feature.

He's been in the fridge more than he should be, fed less regularly than recommended, and has still produced some of the best loaves I've made. Which is either a testament to his resilience or a sign that I've been overthinking it. Probably both.

The Sourdough Database is a work in progress. That's intentional. The goal isn't a finished product — it's a living thing that grows with the bakers who use it. Here's what's being built:

This won't happen all at once. The ADHD brain works in sprints, not marathons. But each piece that gets built is built properly — because half a good tool is worse than no tool, and a recipe database with one recipe is just a recipe.

If you're a baker with something to contribute — a starter that should be documented, an essay that should exist, a flour that deserves a profile — find me. The contact is at the bottom of the page. I read everything, just not always quickly.