Monthly Bread Making Workbook

Tracking bread making without going insane

I started using a Monthly Bread Making Workbook about three years ago because my notebook entries were becoming impossible to read and I kept forgetting which sourdough starter version produced the last decent batch of focaccia. It's basically a structured spreadsheet or log where you record everything: what you baked, when, hydration levels, ambient temperature, fermentation times, and how it turned out. The idea is that after a few months you can actually see patterns instead of guessing. Most people build theirs in Google Sheets because you can access it on your phone next to the mixer and share it with anyone who helps bake at your house. I use a pretty simple column layout. Column A is the date, B is the bread type, C is the flour blend with percentages, D is total hydration, E is autolyse time, F is bulk fermentation duration and temperature, G is final proof method and time, H is bake time and temperature, and I is a quality score from one to ten with notes attached. The first month feels pointless. You'll bake maybe six or seven things and the data looks sparse. That's normal. The actual value shows up around month three when you're troubleshooting a dense ciabatta and you scroll back to find that the last successful one was made on a day when the kitchen was twenty-one degrees Celsius instead of the usual twenty-six. Without that record you'd just blame the flour again and move on without learning anything.

One thing I discovered the hard way is that hydration percentage in the formula and actual dough hydration are not the same thing when your environment is dry. Last winter I was baking in an unheated basement that sat around twelve degrees and my doughs felt 3% drier than the formula suggested because evaporation during bulk was significant. I started adding a column for observed dough feel on a scale of tacky to slack and that fixed my consistency problems immediately. If your workbook doesn't account for environmental variables it will give you false confidence in the numbers. Here is where people go wrong and where the method starts to fail. The biggest issue is that you will abandon it within six weeks if you make data entry feel like a second job. I tried logging every single detail including weighing each ingredient as I added it and I burned out by week four because by the time I finished writing everything down my bread was already eaten. The workaround was to only record the data after baking, not during, and to skip anything you're not actively trying to learn from. If you don't care about whether you pre-fermented the flour or mixed it all at once then don't log that variable. Keep the sheet small enough that filling it takes under two minutes per bake. Another limitation that isn't obvious until you hit month four is that spreadsheets punish you for changing the column structure. I once added a column for starter feeding schedule mid-project and suddenly every formula I'd recorded broke because the percentage calculations referenced cells that had shifted. I ended up spending two hours reformatting old entries just to accommodate one new variable. Either stick to a fixed template or use a database tool that handles schema changes better. For most home bakers a static spreadsheet is fine, but you need to commit to the columns before you start filling them in.

There are also edge cases where a workbook simply won't help you. If you bake exclusively from sourdough starters that you feed irregularly and never track, no amount of documentation in the bread log will explain why your crumb structure varies. The workbook only captures what you choose to put in it. If your starter is the wild card and you refuse to log starter activity, the tool becomes decorative. In that situation you need a separate starter log before the bread workbook becomes useful. I also found that the quality scoring column is the most important one and the one people skip. Writing "good" or "bad" is useless. I switched to scoring based on specific criteria: crust color on a one to five scale, crumb openness, chewiness, and overall eatability. Two weeks later I could see that my scores for crust color dropped consistently on days I used a Dutch oven without preheating it long enough, which led me to bump my preheat time from twenty minutes to thirty-five and fix the problem in one adjustment. If you want something more structured than building your own sheet from scratch, there are pre-made templates floating around baking forums and a couple of well-maintained ones on spreadsheet sharing sites. The ones that work best are the minimalist versions with fifteen columns or fewer. Anything bulkier than that and you'll stop using it, I guarantee it.

The real test of whether this approach is working for you comes at month six. At that point you should be able to look at a bad bake and answer the question "what changed compared to last time?" without digging through three different conversation threads in a Facebook group or watching someone else's twenty-minute video. If you can't, the problem is usually that you weren't recording the right variables, not that the system is flawed.