Here’s the obscene spreadsheet where all my bread baking gets tracked.

Most sourdough recipes involve about the same 10ish steps that take anywhere from 12-36 hours to carry out start-to-finish. The Tartine bread book, which I (like many in spring of 2020) started from square one with, expounds on each of these steps in immense detail. I both needed a quick reference to remind me what the heck “bulk fermentation” entails, and also a way of mathing out the timings. So the original form of this sheet is just that recipe summarized, with a column to calculate when each beat should occur given my start time:

I continued duplicating this tab out with each bake on a ~weekly basis for a while, and the details of the steps became less important to have written. As I practiced and took in other sources of information I also tinkered lots with timings, techniques and ingredients, which get their own place on the sheet now (and I usually do a typical crusty loaf plus a softer, whole-wheatier sandwich bread for toast — hence the two different doughs you see side-by-side on the final sheet).

It no longer feels essential to have the guidelines of the sheet to get through a bake, but I’m far too committed to continuing the tracking to stop (and it still saves my butt to have the timings written down somewhere, now and then). Since I’ve tracked them all and named the tabs consistently, I can also use a quick script to total them up: as of Aug 2023, it’s been ~275 loaves baked from this starter (I’m aware I need to calm down).

Anyway, here are both versions in a spreadsheet, if anyone cares to use or reference it!