Sourdough bakers Erik Fabian, a home baker/marketer, and Jennifer Yoko Olson, a home baker/industrial designer, are the co-founders of Sourhouse, which envisions a world where people gather daily to share homemade sourdough bread and other fermented foods. To that end, they are on a mission to help people bake more sourdough bread by creating thoughtfully designed baking tools and inviting people to bake more often.

Sourhouse launched publicly in 2021 with a project to find the most hopeful sourdough baking stories in the US. With people across the country going through difficult times under the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, this outlet allowed bakers to share inspiring stories of how sourdough kept them going, each in their unique ways.

Founders Jennifer Yoko Olson and Erik Fabian. (Source: Sourhouse)

Another way in which Sourhouse is encouraging bakers is by quietly giving away free sourdough starter (it is currently only available to bakers living in the US and Canada). The project has been scaling up slowly at first, but the ultimate goal is to give away at least 5,000 starters by the end of 2024.

In addition to these projects, Sourhouse has invited bakers to contribute to its free Sourhouse Community Cookbook, a crowd-sourced cookbook filled with recipes, tips and tricks.

Sourhouse’s core business is making and selling baking tools. Fabian and Olson are the co-inventors of Goldie, the first countertop warming device dedicated to giving a safe home to sourdough starters. 

Every sourdough baker keeps a starter and is constantly looking for warm spots in their kitchen to store it. Goldie by Sourhouse provides just enough warmth to keep a sourdough starter consistently in the “Goldilocks Zone” of 75-82ºF / 24-28ºC where it is the most active and healthy.

It features gentle heat to warm a starter without the risk of overheating it; a small footprint with the capacity to hold up to a quart-sized jar; an auto-warming on/off switch; a transparent, borosilicate glass cloche so bakers can see their starter from anywhere in their kitchen; a simple three-zone thermometer (indicated with blue, gold and red lights) that helps bakers understand their starter’s behavior and anticipate their time to bake; and a Sourhouse Cooling Puck for the occasional need to cool down a starter in a too hot room in preparation for baking. Goldie is built with energy efficiency in mind, is food-safe, water resistant and cleans up with a damp sponge.

The easy-to-clean Sourhouse Starter Jar is now available as well. The borosilicate glass jars are designed without those threads found on jars with screw top lids so the dried starter cannot accumulate. The unique silicon lid design sits on the outside of the jar to keep the jar covered and still easy to clean. The jar has a flat bottom, so bakers get great contact with the warming base in Goldie and a very efficient warmth transfer.