Sourdough Sidekick automates the boring part of baking

Sourdough bread is inherently old-fashioned, relying on natural fermentation and wild yeast rather than simple, predictable commercial stuff. So it may seem like a curse to introduce a gadget into the mix.

The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick — backed and branded by the King Arthur Flour Company — is that it promises to automate the tedious part of sourdough baking: managing the starter. It feeds the flour and water on a set schedule, and is ready right when you want to bake, leaving you to focus on the actual kneading, shaping, and baking.

Like any single-purpose kitchen tool, you need to be confident that you’ll get enough use to justify the cost and counter space. That’s doubly true here thanks to a few design quirks that make using the Sourdough Sidekick frustrating if you don’t bake several times a week.

The Sourdough Sidekick is a joint venture between FirstBuild – GE Appliances’ “Innovation Center” responsible for… Viral opal ice maker – and the King Arthur Baking Company, which is why you’ll see the latter’s logo on the front. He – she It was launched with a crowdfunding campaign in March 2025, but is now available to purchase directly from King Arthur for $179.99 – although it’s only available in the US.

The basic process is very simple. Drop a small amount of your starter into the bowl — 15 grams, or about a tablespoon — and fill the dispensers with flour and water. In automatic mode, you can then tell Sidekick when you want to make bread, how much starter you’ll need for your recipe, and it will drip-feed the flour and water on a dynamic schedule that takes into account the local temperature, mixing as you go, so you end up with just the right amount of starter, at its peak, right when you need it.

Using simple white bread flour, this was a wonderful treat. I told the Sidekick I wanted to bake in a few days, left it alone, and returned to find my starter strong, healthy, and ready to bake a pretty decent white loaf. If anything my bread came out a little too much, suggesting that the Sidekick produced a livelier starter than I usually manage myself.

You don’t have to use white flour, but any time you switch flours, you’ll have to spend a few minutes recalibrating the Sidekick to account for different densities. It handled most whole wheat and rye flours well, although when I tried coarsely ground rye flour from British milling company Landrace for… Danish-style dense rye loafthe resulting primer proved too thick for the Sidekick to mix properly, leaving me with dry clumps and thin spots. The starter needed more water to reach the right texture, but for that I needed to leave the simple auto mode.

Auto mode has some other limitations. It’s designed to work with exactly 15 grams from the start, so you’ll have to weigh that every time to get the proportions right. What’s even more annoying is that it has weird limits on the minimum amount of starter you want to make. Set a baking day a few days later and it will allow you to make at least 150g, but aim for four or more days and insist on making at least 400g. This is much more than I would normally use in a single loaf, which results in a much greater amount being thrown out (excess starter that you won’t use in baking) than hand feeding would ever produce.

There is no option to put Sidekick into automatic maintenance mode. You He owns To set a baking day, that is He has That will be within the next week. It’s great if you know you’ll be baking soon and when. But sometimes I just want to keep my starter alive and don’t know for sure when I’ll need a loaf of bread next. In this case, you either set a random target date and let it get rid of some stuff, or pull the main crock out of the machine, put the lid on it, and put the whole thing in the fridge for a few days.

The Sidekick has two other modes, Ratio and Custom, which are a little more flexible. While Auto feeds your starter with flour and water at a 1:1:1 ratio, Ratio Mode gives you some preset ratios to choose from and lets you adjust the amount of starter seeds and feeding frequency. A curious limitation is that the specified proportions differ only in the ratio of the starter relative to the other ingredients. The ratio mode doesn’t let you add unequal amounts of flour and water to make a starter that’s thicker or thinner than usual — exactly what I needed for my coarse rye flour.

So you need a custom mode. This allows you to adjust the amount of seed, feeding frequency, and exact amounts of flour and water you want in each meal. I’ve been able to use it to make a slightly looser starter for my rye, thin enough to happily mix the Sidekick, and it should be possible to use it to create a custom maintenance mode with finer feeds. FirstBuild also provides instructions on using Custom to build a starter from scratch — I was able to get a new starter up and running in four days — or rehabilitate one on its last legs. Just note that neither Relative or Custom mode takes ambient temperature into account, unlike Auto mode, so it won’t adjust the feeding schedule if it’s particularly warm or cold, and you’ll have to monitor how active the starter is yourself.

The Sidekick isn’t actually a smart home gadget. There’s a Wi-Fi option and an app, but they’re easy to ignore. The app will send notifications when your playback device is ready for use or the discard should be removed, but the built-in display does that too. Otherwise, the app lets you check your current Sidekick settings, but doesn’t let you change them. There is no compelling reason to use it.

FirstBuild recommends cleaning the bowl, lid, and paddle between each feeding cycle to prevent unwanted buildup. It seems like common sense, but the bowl and lid are not dishwasher safe, so you’ll have to wash them by hand. It is often recommended to wash the water tank and flour hopper, but at least they can be put in the dishwasher.

The sidekick is also strangely loud. By default, it cranks the starter once every two hours, which involves 30 seconds of loud buzzing each time. Since it’s probably going to be in your kitchen, that’s probably fine, but in a small space like a studio apartment, it might get on your nerves.

I can’t see myself buying a Sourdough Sidekick, but that’s mostly me. My kitchen is too small to accommodate single-purpose appliances (except for the coffee machine), and my fiancée is counting down the days until she can reclaim counter space and eliminate the mixing noises every couple of hours.

I also don’t bake enough to get the most out of it. I make one loaf a week at most and usually less. I would be popping my starter in and out of the Sidekick on a regular basis, perhaps hand-feeding it between weeks in the fridge, and losing half the benefit of having it in the first place.

But if I had a bigger kitchen and baked twice a week? I think I’d be happy to have a device that takes care of the one part of baking I don’t really care about. I suppose my partner will have to come to terms with the noise.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge