GoKawiilBaking sourdough bread is inherently old-fashioned, relying on natural fermentation and wild yeast instead of the simple, predictable commercial stuff. So it might sound anathema to bring a gadget into the mix.
The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick — backed and branded by King Arthur flour — is that it promises to automate the boring bit of sourdough baking: starter management. It feeds your starter flour and water on a set schedule, ready for exactly when you want to bake, leaving you to focus on kneading, shaping, and the actual baking.
Like any single-purpose kitchen gadget, you’ll have to be confident you’ll get enough use to justify both the cost and the counter space. That’s doubly true here thanks to a few design quirks that make the Sourdough Sidekick frustrating to use if you don’t bake multiple times a week.
The Sourdough Sidekick is a joint project by FirstBuild — the GE Appliances “innovation hub” responsible for the viral Opal ice maker — and King Arthur Baking Company, which is why you’ll see the latter’s logo on the front. It launched with a crowdfunding campaign in March 2025, but it’s now available to buy directly from King Arthur for $179.99 — though it’s US-only.
The basic operation is pretty simple. You drop a small amount of existing starter into the crock — 15g, or a tablespoon’s worth — and fill the two dispensers with flour and water. On Auto mode, you then tell the Sidekick when you want to make bread, and how much starter you’ll need for your recipe, and it will drip-feed flour and water on a dynamic schedule that takes into account the local temperature, mixing as it goes, so that you end up with the right amount of starter, at its peak of activity, right when you need it.
Using a simple white bread flour, this worked a treat. I told the Sidekick I wanted to bake in a few days’ time, left it alone, and came back to find my starter strong, healthy, and ready to bake a pretty decent white loaf. If anything my bread came out overproofed, suggesting the Sidekick produced a more active starter than I usually manage by myself.
Flour goes in the hopper at the top. Water in the detachable tank at the back. And a few buttons and a dial handle the controls. In Auto mode, you simply set a goal date, time, and starter weight.
You don’t have to use white flour, though any time you switch flours, you’ll have to spend a few minutes recalibrating the Sidekick to account for the different densities. It handled most whole wheat and rye flours just fine, though when I tried an especially coarse-milled rye flour from British miller Landrace for a dense Danish-style rye loaf, the resulting starter proved too thick for the Sidekick to mix properly, leaving me with dry clumps and thin patches. The starter needed more water to reach the right texture, but for that I needed to leave the pointedly simple Auto mode.
Auto mode has a few other limitations. It’s designed to work with exactly 15g of starter to begin with, so you’ll have to weigh that out every time to get the proportions right. More annoyingly, it has odd limits to the minimum amount of starter it’s willing to make. Set a bake day a few days out and it’ll let you produce as little as 150g, but aim for four days or longer and it insists on making at least 400g. That’s far more than I usually use in a single loaf, resulting in much more discard (excess starter you won’t use to bake) than my manual feeding ever creates.
There’s no option to set the Sidekick into an Auto maintenance mode. You have to set a bake day, and that has to be within the next week. That’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 next need a loaf of bread. In that case, you either have to set an arbitrary target date and let it create some discard, or pull the main crock out of the machine, pop the lid on, and stick the whole thing in the fridge for a few days.
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