Sourdough

A real-time sourdough starter you keep alive, bake with, and pass on.

Status: beta

Platforms: Web, iOS, Android

Live at: sourdough.theperfectship.com

Catch a wild starter from the air, keep it alive on a real-world clock, bake with it, and gift dried “flakes” to friends that carry your starter’s provenance down a real lineage. The simulation is a pure function of state and elapsed time, so it runs on the real clock, catches up while you are away, and needs no backend at all.

Feed it — the flour you choose shapes its traits — catch it at peak, and read its mood from an expressive jar face. Grace is built in: fridge mode for holidays, dormancy rather than death, and a free revival ritual. Baking is a peak-timing mini-game that grades the loaf and reveals the crumb; a fourteen-recipe tree runs from a country loaf to panettone, and the best loaves are kept in a compendium.

Nothing you do here reaches a server. There are no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, and no third-party trackers. Sharing works by packing a starter into a self-contained token inside a link or QR code, and backups are a portable code or file that you hold. Location is read once, on the device, to record where a starter was caught — see the privacy page.