Strike While the Oven is Hot

December 3, 2025

Cousin Mark was a baker. He learned to make sourdough when operating a kitchenware shop in San Francisco, where they told him there was something special in the water, that making real sourdough couldn't be done anywhere else. He didn't listen. He started making sourdough for a bakery in Seattle and then took his SF starter to Santa Ana where, in 1989, he co-founded Gold Coast Baking Co., now one of the largest privately-owned bakeries in Southern California. Mark passed away about 15 years ago, but I'll always remember his sense of humor, boundless energy, and enthusiasm for life.

The perpetual student strikes again. I just finished a 10-week "Baking Fundamentals: Breads, Pies, and Pastries" course at Seattle Central College. And so now, five years after the pandemic, I know how to make sourdough. In Seattle.

Article content "Chaussons aux Pommes" My first loaves were awful. I didn't understand have good intuition for the process even after reading the recipes. And so I did the obvious thing -- I turned to a chatbot to put the process in terms that I might better understand.

So it's like bringing more beer to a party and removing half the empties and kicking out half the guests. But they will invite new guests soon enough Ha! That's actually a brilliant analogy. Yes, exactly like that. You're keeping half the guests (microbes) who are still capable of partying, giving them fresh beer (flour), and clearing out half the empties (waste acids). The remaining guests immediately start reproducing—yeast cells can double every few hours under good conditions—so within 4-8 hours you're back to a full party at peak energy. I started making two loaves per week. One for home, one for a friend. And there's absolutely nothing like cutting into a loaf of freshly baked sourdough just a few hours out of the oven. Fresh bread is now a fixed part of the menu rotation. But my wife can't handle rich dairy desserts, so I wasn't able to do replicate the classroom versions of the pain au lait, or the chocolate cream pie, or the pumpkin mascarpone tartlets. Until last week.

Baking the syllabus Okay, I went a little overboard. In six days leading up to Thanksgiving, I baked three breads and four desserts for a 22-person dinner. And then for a Saturday evening get-together with friends, I continued the baking marathon with a quiche, cheddar-jalapeno biscuits, and two more pies.

How did I do it?

That's right! AI again!

Article content Tarts > Centaurs > Minotaurs Throughout my baking marathon, was I a "centaur" (human in charge, AI labor) or a "minotaur" (AI in charge, human labor)? Does it really matter? We ended up with baked goods, and plenty of them.

With AI, I was able to take on a much more ambitious project than I would have been able to do otherwise. And it all happened with better results and less stress.

And once the holiday pressure was off, I did the Saturday night pies without any AI assistance at all. The scaffolding came down, and I went back to human-only baking with improved confidence and skill.

Advice for AI-assisted bakers

My best advice is to take pictures:

Pots and pans, to match each of your planned pies and breads with a vessel Equipment, so that you're not trying to roll a flat pie crust with a tapered rolling pin Refrigerator interior, for help on playing Tetris with pies Coolers and insulated bags, so you know how to move desserts from your kitchen to the party without incident

The future of bakeries Am I now ready to follow in Cousin Mark's footsteps and start a bakery? I don't know about that, but I have been thinking about the increasingly porous border between SaaS products and custom-built software.

I did research on food service software:

Inventory management. Bill of materials costing ("Recipe explosion"), COGS automation, variance analysis, and shrinkage Kitchen production scheduling. Production models, equipment optimization, economic break-even, MRP Labor scheduling. Predictable scheduling ordinances, predictability pay, "clopening" (scheduling someone for closing + opening), and break compliance Plus the usual suspects for a retail business, including point-of-sale software and accounting packages.

If you can afford a software budget of $100-$500/month and up, it probably makes sense to use the best-in-class SaaS products in each of these categories.

But if you're a micro-bakery trying to avoid that kind of overhead, it's my belief that you have the ability to replicate those capabilities using open-source software and general-purpose chatbots:

Free ERP software for recipe databases Free constraint programming modules for labor scheduling and production scheduling Low-cost, chatbot-powered onboarding for new employees learning how to bake your menu

All you need is a baker who knows how to program; or a programmer who's learned how to bake. (A "tart-taur"?)

And these days, that's no longer a rare combination.