Review: Goldie by Sourhouse

I love making bread, but I never had that sourdough-fanatic phase that many people went through and many spouses tolerated, sometimes happily. Yet Maurizio Leo's fantastic 2022 cookbook, The Perfect Loaf, opened my mind a bit, and a gadget at my favorite trade show got me to break down and make some starter.

The gadget in question is called the Goldie, made by a company called Sourhouse. It's designed to hold your starter in the “Goldilocks zone”—the range between the mid-70s and mid-80s Fahrenheit—that’s warmer than room temperature but “not too hot” and “not too cold.” The Goldie is a circular heater with a pretty glass cloche on top that is large enough to enclose a quart-sized jar of starter. It also comes with a cooling puck that you toss in the freezer and bust out on hot days when the starter gets too warm.

I called in a Goldie and two of the company’s seamless starter jars, along with two similar-size Weck canning jars. (Seamlessness is next to godliness for starter makers.) This allowed me to create and chart the progress of two batches of starter. One batch would spend the whole time in the Goldie and the other in a warm spot on my kitchen counter next to my rice cooker. Each batch used one of each jar.

Sourdough starter is the yeasty mixture made of flour and water that helps your bread rise and gives it that wonderful tangy sour flavor. For something that just sits there all day, it's a surprisingly needy thing; caring for one is often compared to caring for a pet. You need to “refresh” starter once or twice a day, depending on whose scripture you're reading. Leo has a section heading in his book called “Do I Have To Refresh My Starter Twice A Day … Forever?” His answer is a gentle, paragraph-long “yes.”

Refreshing is essentially feeding the active yeasts that you cultivate in your starter jar. This means pouring most of it—the “discard”—into the compost or finding a use for it, then adding flour and warm water to what's left, keeping you in a constant, rolling supply of happily fermented goo. Refresh it on the regular and your starter can outlive you. For those new to the process, there's a whole sloppy phase to go through where you train yourself to make every refresh neater than the last. For me, this meant pouring a weight of “carryover” from the active jar into a clean and empty one, then adding fresh flour and warm water by weight.

The Goldie fits up to a quart size jar. Sourhouse also sells its own borosilicate glass jars designed for starter storage, one of which is shown here, for $14 each.

Photograph: Sourhouse

I watched the Goldie and not-Goldie batches of starter move along through phases. They would rise and fall, experience good days and boring days, and smell weird before taking on magical banana aromas. The further in I got into the process, the more interesting this became. Eventually, it turned into something that, to paraphrase Leo, was consistently bubbly, had a loose texture and sour smell, and tended to rise a bit every day. The thing I wasn't noticing was much of a difference between the Goldie and non-Goldie batches. Yes, maybe tiny differences in smell and texture once in a while, but nothing that didn't even out within a day. Both batches were clearly headed in the same direction.

I also happened to be watching The Bear right around this time, watching Chef Marcus—actor Lionel Boyce—work his way through The Noma Guide To Fermentation and toward the perfect donut. When Marcus built a special chamber at his pastry station to house his experiments, this helped me realize that the Goldie is technically a fermentation chamber, a heated terrarium-like space designed to keep your ferment-y microbes happy.

The Goldie comes with a cooling puck, shown at left. Store it in the freezer and use it to chill out a dough ball that's gotten overheated.

Photograph: Sourhouse

That whole terrarium idea was helpful, but it also exposed one of Goldie's weaknesses, indirectly highlighted by an America's Test Kitchen article by Paul Adams that suggests using a $13 reptile heating pad to keep things warm in a fermentation chamber. Those of you considering a Goldie, which costs $158 with a pair of jars and $130 without, might twitch when you clock the premium you'll pay for beauty. Leo's book suggests not a fermentation chamber for starter but just a “warm spot in your kitchen,” like the top of the fridge or next to an appliance that's always on. Reptile pads keep a terrarium full of lizards happy (and alive!) at a temperature that's closer to the jungle they came from as opposed to a drafty corner of your rec room. While I parked my non-Goldie batch next to the warm sidewall of my rice cooker, it was doing about the same as the Goldie batch, yet it did so with heat from just one side. If you don't have a consistently warm spot in your kitchen, a reptile pad would work just fine.

On a hunch, I took out my ThermoWorks infrared temperature gun and started tracking temperatures every time I refreshed the Goldie batch. The heating element was right where it should have been, averaging just under 79 degrees, but the top of the starter just a few inches above was always closer to 74 degrees. My non-Goldie batch was always right around 75 degrees. The pretty glass cloche wasn't having much effect; it's a fermentation chamber, but not a well-insulated one.

Right around the same time, I stumbled into a project that Maurizio Leo himself was involved with, seemingly in an effort to keep temperatures more even from top to bottom. His Sourdough Home works like a Goldie, but is insulated like (and, perhaps unfortunately, resembles) a little dorm fridge.

With my two batches of starter ready, I went ahead and made a bunch of bread—six loaves, one after another in my combo cooker—following a two-day, “almost no-knead” recipe and Leo's recipe for classic sourdough. The no-knead loaves came out a little dense, making me worry, but Leo's three-day high-effort version yielded a high reward. These were bakery-quality boules, tall and beautiful with a dark crust. The Goldie's loaves rose a wee bit more, but it's also possible they were just in better-shaped vessels during bulk fermentation and proofing; there wasn't enough difference between the Goldie and non-Goldie loaves to justify its expense.

The Goldie worked fine, but I wish it worked better. I found the difference between its starter and the starter I made by putting it next to something warm to be fairly indistinguishable. If you love the look of the Goldie and want to display your starter in a prominent spot on your countertop and can stomach the price, go for it. It keeps your starter happy. You'll love it. Otherwise, you'll be just as happy parking a Weck jar of starter on top of the fridge, next to your rice cooker, or on a reptile pad.