Saving Bread

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Maurizio Leo, founder of The Perfect Loaf and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, joins me to celebrate the release of his new book, The Perfect Pizza.

Growing up in his father's pizzeria, Maurizio developed a love for pizza long before he became known for sourdough bread. Now he's bringing his thoughtful, technique-driven approach to making exceptional sourdough pizza at home.

We explore what makes pizza dough different from bread dough, why fermentation is everything, choosing the right flour, managing hydration and extensibility, using young levains, and...

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A little something different this week! I'm sitting down for an unedited Q&A, answering questions submitted by Saving Bread listeners from around the world.

We're talking about blending flours for better sourdough, shaping dough based on how it behaves, knowing when to stop adding bassinage water, choosing quality grains without breaking the bank, and finding loyal customers for your cottage bakery.

And we end with a more personal question: What has bread baking taught me about myself?

From practical baking techniques to the...

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What do sourdough bread, music, pottery, and a colorful silicone scrubber have in common? Joshua Grange.

Joshua is a lifelong professional musician who has toured and recorded with artists including kd lang, Beck, and Sheryl Crow. He's also a passionate sourdough baker, the creator of DOAP, and the musician behind the Saving Bread theme song.

In this episode, Allison sits down with her good friend Joshua for a funny, thoughtful, and wonderfully unpredictable conversation about creativity, friendship, and finding fulfillment in the things we make.

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What does it take to build a stronger, more connected baking community, and how do we make sure the people preserving the craft of bread baking have the resources they need to succeed?

This week on Saving Bread, I'm joined by Karen Bornarth, Executive Director of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, and Wai Chu, the Guild's Education and Events Manager, for a conversation about education, community, the business of baking, and the future of our industry.

Founded in 1993, the Bread Bakers Guild of...

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This week on Saving Bread, I'm joined by Cat Cox, the baker and owner of Country Bird Bakery in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the 2025 James Beard Award winner for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker.

Cat's journey into baking began in restaurant kitchens, where her curiosity about sourdough and locally sourced ingredients eventually grew into a much bigger vision. In 2022, she opened Country Bird Bakery with a commitment to celebrating the grains, farmers, millers, and agricultural traditions of the American Heartland.

At the center of Cat's philosophy is...

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My dear friend, mentor, and fellow baker Josh Fairbanks returns to Saving Bread for an honest, completely unedited conversation about scalds, dough development, and the art of becoming a more intuitive baker.

We begin by answering listener-submitted questions about scalds: what they are, how they differ from porridges, and why they can be such a valuable tool for incorporating flavorful grains like rye, einkorn, and buckwheat into bread. We discuss hydration, starch gelatinization, mixing techniques, and practical considerations for both home bakers and larger-scale production.<...

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What happens when you take a community that's grown online and bring everyone together in person?

This week on Saving Bread, Allison sits down with her longtime friend Laila, the baker and educator behind The Early Rise and founder of West Coast Breadfest.

After attending Asheville Breadfest, Laila was inspired to create something similar for the West Coast. What followed was an enormous undertaking that brought together bakers, educators, millers, and bread enthusiasts for a day dedicated to learning and community.

Laila shares how...

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Jill Nguyen didn’t grow up baking. In fact, she didn’t start until 2020.

What began as a pandemic bread obsession eventually became Capitol Jill Baking, her Washington, DC microbakery known for naturally leavened breads, inventive pastries, and colorful, highly personal cakes.

In this episode, Jill and I talk about how she built a baking style that feels unmistakably her own. We get into how she develops new products, why she often starts with a feeling rather than a flavor, and how she bala...

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This week on Saving Bread, Allison sits down with Jon and Amanda of Proof Bread in Arizona.

Proof began in 2017 with hand-mixed dough, one farmers market, a few wholesale accounts, and a home bakery. Today, Proof has grown to five locations, nearly 100 employees, an in-house milling program, relationships with local grain producers, and an entirely sourdough menu.

Jon and Amanda share what that growth has actually looked like behind the scenes, including hiring their first employees, investing in equipment, building systems, developing an...

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Leah is back for another Rabbit Hole episode, and this time we’re talking about what we’ve been eating, where we’ve been traveling, and the loaf everyone in the bread world seems to have an opinion about.

Leah shares her visit to Moulin in Napa, where whole grains and freshly milled flour are worked into breads and pastries. Allison takes us through her trip to Mexico City and Panadería Rosetta, including the guava roll, pan de elote, whole wheat croissants, and the tres leches cake that wa...

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pH is one of the topics I’m asked about most often, but the number on a meter is only one part of understanding fermentation.

In Lessons E08 of Saving Bread, I break down what is happening inside a sourdough culture and explain how I use pH in my own baking and production.

We talk about the relationship between yeast and lactic acid bacteria, the enzymes naturally present in flour, how starch becomes available to microorganisms during fermentation, why organic acids cause pH to fa...

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What does it take to build an incredibly open, delicate sourdough crumb when you are working with different flour, a different climate, and different equipment than the bakers who originally inspired you?

This week on Saving Bread, I am joined by Anujay Krishna, a baker in Lucknow, India, whose beautifully open, lacy country loaves have made him one of the most requested guests on the podcast.

Anujay did not grow up eating this style of bread. His early relationship with bread came through the rotis and...

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How do you choose the right whole grain flour when the names on the bag start to feel overwhelming?

Baylin Speidel, head baker at Chimacum Valley Grainery, returns to Saving Bread for a practical conversation about grain selection, flour functionality, extraction rates and scalds.

We break down hard red, hard white and soft wheat, along with rye, spelt, buckwheat and einkorn. We talk about which grains provide structure, which may work better in cookies, scalds or pan loaves, and how to choose flour based on what...

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What actually changes when you start adding more whole grain to sourdough?

In this Lessons episode of Saving Bread, Allison White breaks down what happens when a familiar country loaf moves from mostly white bread flour toward 40, 50, 60, or even 100 percent whole grain.

Whole wheat is not white flour with a little extra color. It is a different raw material, and as the percentage increases, it can change water absorption, gluten development, fermentation speed, starter activity, dough strength, pH, handling, and ultimately what a successful loaf looks...

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Jenny Berg of Crumb Sourdough Microbakery joins me for a conversation about what it actually looks like to build a home-based bread business and how many different paths that can take.

Jenny started baking sourdough in 2020 and eventually turned that obsession into Crumb Sourdough Microbakery in Central Oregon. Along the way, she helped organize a grassroots effort to change Oregon’s cottage food laws, built a wholesale business supplying local grocery stores and farm stands, and worked her way up to producing 230 loaves a week on her own.

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This week on Saving Bread, we’re stepping away from the pH meters, fermentation charts, and troubleshooting for a conversation about the other side of bread: history, culture, memory, and story.

Allison sits down with Eric Pallant, author of Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers, to ask a deceptively simple question: What actually makes an old sourdough starter old?

From there, the conversation travels through thousands of years of bread history. Eric and Allison talk about whether the ag...

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Why is your sourdough flat? What causes huge tunnels surrounded by dense crumb? How do you know when bulk fermentation is finished? And when a loaf goes wrong, how do you figure out which part of the process was actually responsible?

In this Lessons episode of Saving Bread, Allison walks through the basic country loaf from start to finish and breaks down some of the most common sourdough problems and what to change on your next bake.

We cover:

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How do you actually know when bulk fermentation is finished? What makes a sourdough starter strong and healthy? And how can understanding the science of fermentation help you become a more intuitive baker?

This week on Saving Bread, Allison White talks with Tom Cucuzza, creator of The Sourdough Journey, about his years of experimentation with sourdough bread, starter health and bulk fermentation.

Tom has built an enormous body of educational work around understanding what is actually happening inside our starters and doughs...

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This week on Saving Bread, Allison talks with Parker Cook, baker, educator and content creator behind Basil & Bloom.

Parker has built a large online community teaching sourdough bread baking, fermentation, starter maintenance, whole grains, freshly milled flour and microbakery production. But there is already a lot of information online about how Parker makes bread.

This conversation looks more at the person behind that information.

Parker shares how he went from learning to cook while living in Italy to working as a research and development...

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This week on Saving Bread, Allison talks with Martin Sorge, self taught baker, writer, winner of The Great American Baking Show and author of the new cookbook Great Bakes: Modern Classic Recipes from the Midwest.

Martin has spent more than a decade baking with local flour, whole grains and unique grain varieties, and his approach makes experimenting with unfamiliar ingredients feel surprisingly approachable.

In this conversation, Martin and Allison talk about why flour deserves the same attention we give local produce, cheese and other regional foods...

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What changes when flour stops being the background of a loaf and becomes the whole party?

In this episode of Saving Bread, Allison talks with baker and miller Baylin Speidel, head baker at Chimacum Valley Grainery in Chimacum, Washington.

Chimacum Valley Grainery brings farming, stone milling, baking, malting, and brewing together on one property. Baylin shares how working this closely with grain transformed the way she understands flour, flavor, fermentation, and bread.

Baylin walks us through what happens when a wheat berry passes through...

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Ally and Leah are back down the Rabbit Hole for a casual conversation about sourdough experiments, bakery field trips, and the stories we tell through bread.

Inspired by Sourdough Culture by Eric Pallant, Leah creates a sourdough starter from scratch for the first time—funky smells, mysterious liquid, daily feedings and all. Meanwhile, Ally compares a traditional flour-and-water starter with one made using pineapple juice. They discuss false rises, acidity, starter pH, unpleasant early-stage bacteria and whether the pineapple juice method actually makes creating a starter easier.

...

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In Lessons Episode 4, we take the country dough formula we created in our Baker’s Math episode and finally turn it into a loaf of bread.

I’ll walk you through the entire process, beginning with the night-before levain build and continuing through the autolyse, mixing, gluten development, bulk fermentation, folds, pre-shaping, final shaping, basket proof, cold retard, scoring, baking, cooling, and evaluating the finished loaf.

Along the way, we’ll cover:

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What began as Campbell McFarlane’s own obsession with sourdough eventually became RackMaster- an oven designed to give home, cottage, and small-scale bakers access to thoughtfully engineered equipment without requiring a traditional bakery.

In this episode, Campbell shares how he moved from baking in Dutch ovens and a small deck oven to designing one of the most recognizable ovens in the cottage-baking world. We talk about the very real learning curve that comes with moving into open deck baking, why a great oven cannot disguise poorly fermented dough, an...

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Baker's math doesn't have to be intimidating.

In this episode, we're breaking down one of the most misunderstood topics in bread baking into something practical and approachable. We'll walk through baker's percentages, hydration, total formula, mixing-day formula, and pre-fermented flour (PFF)—without getting lost in complicated equations.

Together, we'll build a simple country bread formula step by step, learn how to account for the flour and water in your levain, and scale that recipe into a home-sized loaf you can bake right alongside future ep...

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What happens when you treat every ingredient like it matters?

In this episode of Saving Bread, I sit down with Alexandra Allen of Wildwoman Bakery to explore how freshly milled grains can completely transform sourdough baking—from cookies and pastries to naturally leavened breads.

We dive into how Alex thinks about flour selection, butter, vanilla, levain behavior, and ingredient quality to build flavor from the ground up. Whether you're curious about baking with fresh-milled flour or looking for new ways to bring cr...

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Your sourdough starter is alive—and small changes in how you feed and maintain it can dramatically change how it behaves.

In this episode of Saving Bread, we explore the four biggest variables that influence a sourdough starter: hydration, temperature, flour choice, and inoculation (seed percentage). Understanding how each of these factors affects fermentation will help you troubleshoot sluggish starters, adapt to seasonal changes, and build a starter that performs consistently.

Whether you're just getting started or you've been baking sourdough for ye...

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What can we learn when we slow down and connect with the people growing and making our food?

In this episode of Saving Bread, Leah and I reflect on our visit to the MAUM Market, where we explore the value of shopping locally, supporting small makers, and building stronger connections to our food and communities.

We also introduce the Saving Bread Book Club, a new series where we'll read and discuss books that explore bread, grain, fermentation, food...

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What if the best sourdough baker you know isn't following the recipe exactly?

In this episode of Saving Bread, I sit down with Josh Fairbanks, a bread and bagel baker from Portland, to talk about the balance between technical knowledge and intuition in sourdough baking.

We explore what it really means to know your sourdough starter, why learning to read your dough is just as important as following a formula, and how working with local millers can deepen your understanding...

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Welcome to the first Saving Bread Lessons episode.

If sourdough starter has ever felt confusing, intimidating, or just plain high maintenance, this episode is for you.

In this beginner-friendly lesson, we’re covering the foundations of starter care: what a starter actually is, how often to feed it, refrigeration, common mistakes, weird smells, and how to stop overthinking the process.

Because keeping a healthy starter alive should feel approachable, not stressful.

In this episode, we cover:
• What a sourdough starter actually is

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Welcome to Saving Bread — a podcast about baking, grain, fermentation, craftsmanship, and the people keeping the traditions of real food alive.