The System I Use for Tracking Every Loaf I've Ever Baked
I started tracking my bread because I kept rebaking the same mistakes. The hydration was right, the flour was fine, but the crust was tough and the crumb was gummy. I didn't know why until I wrote it down. That was three years ago. Now I have a spreadsheet with 147 entries, and I can look back and see exactly what happened to a sourdough I made on November 12th last year. The tool I use is basically a simple journal. Some people call it a bread baking log, others use the phrase Bread Making Journal Easy when they want something searchable on the internet. I don't care about the name. I care that it exists in a file I can open on my phone while the dough is bulk fermenting.
How to Set Up a Bread Making Journal Easy
Here is the actual setup. I use a Google Sheet because it syncs across devices and I can add rows without thinking about it. The columns are non-negotiable, and I will explain why each one matters below. You can use a notebook if you prefer. I tried notebooks. I stopped using them after six months because I could not search through handwriting. If you go digital, keep it in a cloud-synced location. Your phone dies. Your laptop gets stolen. A cloud spreadsheet does not have those problems. The first column is date. Second is flour type and brand. Third is hydration percentage. Fourth is salt percentage. Fifth is starter percentage. Sixth is fermentation time at room temperature. Seventh is proofing time in the fridge. Eighth is bake temperature. Ninth is bake time with lid on, with lid off. Tenth is dough temperature when shaped. Eleventh is a one-line result note. Twelfth is a rating from one to five based on crumb structure, crust, and flavor. That last column is where most people fail. They write notes but they never rate the outcome. Without a score, you cannot see trends. You will remember that the banana bread was good and the focaccia was bad, but you will forget which flour made the sourdough dense. The rating system forces you to pick a number, and numbers are easier to compare than memories.
I also add a column for ambient humidity when I remember. This is not essential for every bake. It matters most when you live somewhere with seasonal shifts, like Portland or Seattle. In dry winter months, your dough will feel different even if you do everything exactly the same. Writing down that the humidity was thirty percent helps you connect the dots later. Here is a practical example from my own logs. On March third this year, I baked a 72 percent hydration sourdough using King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour. The dough temperature at shaping was 76 degrees. I bulk fermented for four hours. I cold proofed for fourteen hours in the fridge. I baked at 500 degrees with the lid on for twenty minutes, then forty minutes with the lid off. The result was a decent loaf with a slightly thick crust and an open but uneven crumb. I rated it a three. I also noted that the starter had been fed only eight hours earlier, which is shorter than my usual twelve-hour window. That detail mattered more than I expected. Two weeks later, I reproduced the same recipe but fed the starter at ten hours and dropped the bake time with the lid off to thirty-five minutes. The rating went up to a four. The difference was barely noticeable to anyone except me, but I have a record of it now. That is the whole point. You are building a personal database of cause and effect.
Get the Full Details
What Most People Miss About Logging Bread
There are two things beginners consistently get wrong. The first is that they log the recipe instead of the process. Your ingredients are almost never the bottleneck. The process variables are. Temperature, timing, and handling matter more than whether you used boba or bread flour. Log the conditions, not the shopping list. If you change only the flour brand, note that change specifically. Do not write the entire recipe out every time. You already know the recipe. You need to know what was different about this bake. The second mistake is more subtle. People stop logging when the bread turns out bad. This is backward. The bad bakes are the ones you need to understand the most. A failed loaf contains more information than a successful one because it usually means something went wrong that you can identify and fix. Write down the failure. Note what you think went wrong. Come back to it three months later and see if your diagnosis was correct. This is how you actually improve. I ran into a specific problem last summer that illustrates why logging matters. I was making a high-hydration ciabatta at eighty percent hydration. The dough spread too much during proofing and the oven spring was flat. I logged it as a failure and wrote a guess that the autolyse was too long. I was wrong. The real issue was that my kitchen was twenty-two degrees Celsius instead of the usual eighteen, and I did not adjust the bulk fermentation time. My log showed the ambient temperature because I had started recording that column that month. Without that data point, I would have kept blaming the autolyse for months. I changed nothing about the recipe. I just shortened the bulk by forty-five minutes the next time, and the ciabatta came out right.
That is the real value of this system. It catches the invisible variables. Temperature, humidity, starter age, flour protein content, even the brand of salt can shift your results. When you write them all down, patterns emerge that you would otherwise miss entirely.
The Downsides Nobody Talks About
This system is not perfect. The main problem is maintenance. You have to be honest with yourself about filling out the log immediately after baking. If you wait until the next day, you will forget the dough feel, the rise rate, the actual temperature of the kitchen. The log becomes unreliable. I have months where I skipped entries because life got in the way, and those gaps are frustrating to look back on. Another issue is that spreadsheets are not always mobile-friendly. If you are shaping dough with flour on your hands, opening a Google Sheet on your phone can be annoying. I solved this by pinning the spreadsheet to my phone's home screen and making the columns wide enough to tap without zooming. It is a small fix but it makes the habit stickier. There is also a risk of analysis paralysis. You can become so obsessed with optimizing every variable that you stop enjoying the actual baking. I knew someone who spent more time adjusting his log columns than he spent making bread. This is a real trap. Keep the log simple. If you find yourself spending more than ten minutes per entry, you are overcomplicating it. The goal is a quick reference tool, not a scholarly thesis on fermentation science.
For people who find spreadsheets completely unbearable, the alternative is a dedicated app like BakeCheck or Baker's Math Log. These apps handle the structure for you and often include built-in calculators for baker's percentages. They are useful if you want automation. They are also limited by design. You cannot customize the fields to match your exact workflow, and you are dependent on someone else maintaining the software. I recommend starting with a spreadsheet because it is free and infinitely flexible. If you outgrow it, you can migrate later. The bottom line is that a bread making journal is only as good as the consistency with which you use it. Do not aim for perfection. Aim for enough data that you can spot patterns over time. One bad log entry does not ruin the system. Ten bad entries in a row do. Just keep going back to it.
