Why I built Sauryo

I'm a software engineer, and I've been baking sourdough since December 2018. I made my starter that month and haven't looked back.

Before that, bread was something I admired more than understood. After 2018 it became a practice: feeding the starter, learning to read the dough, paying attention to how a few degrees or a few points of hydration change everything. That attention is the part I love.

Homemade bread is a staple in our house, and I raised my daughter on it from the time she was born. She dives into it with me now, and she's our resident cheese taster on pizza night. I bake more than we can eat on purpose, so there's always a loaf, a pizza, or a batch of cookies to give away. And short of handing someone a warm loaf, the next best thing is helping them bake their own. That's why I've mailed my starter to friends across the country, usually with a few tools and a hard-to-find ingredient to get them going.

A lot of how I feel about bread comes from my father. He grew up in what was then Soviet Russia, where bread was almost a currency. You didn't waste it, and as long as you had bread, you were alright. He still lives by that: he eats bread with every meal, and when a loaf goes stale he kisses it before throwing it away. I think about that more than I expected to. I was raised in a house that ran on the same belief, and in some way, the baking is an homage to him.

Bread and pizza were around me long before I could bake either. My mom ate pizza for lunch almost every weekday she was pregnant with me. And when I was small, before I was five, she worked Saturdays, so my dad had my sister and me to himself. Those days always started the same way: bagels first, then a slice at Lenny's Pizza on 86th Street, the same Lenny's from Saturday Night Fever. It's gone now, but I can still feel three-year-old me tearing into that slice.

For years I kept my formulas in spreadsheets (hydration, starter percentages, salt, scaling a recipe up for a crowd or down to a single loaf), and I shared them with friends and other bakers. They worked for me, but they were clumsy for anyone else to open, adjust, and come back to later. Sauryo is my attempt to turn that workflow into something clearer, more precise, and easier to return to.

Sauryo helps with the math. The craft still happens in the bowl.

Arik