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King Arthur Baking Sourdough Sidekick Review: Rising to the Occasion
Like many people, I enjoy baking my own bread—especially this time of year. I baked sourdough on and off for nearly a decade, even having a recipe tested for a James Beard-winning bread cookbook, but I’m not proud to admit it’s been over a year since I baked a proper sourdough loaf.
As a full-time working parent, maintaining a sourdough starter sometimes feels like bringing home another pet. (You know, the kind your child swears they will care for before abandoning all tasks after three days.) You can certainly keep your starter in the fridge for around a week between bakes, but reviving it may take a day or two of feedings, and let’s be real, Will you remember to do this every week? Even the pet snake my son begged for only needs feeding every other week.
It is for people like me that King Arthur Baking Company and FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ product development lab, created the Sourdough Sidekick, a gizmo that automatically feeds and maintains a sourdough starter for you. We wrote about the Sourdough Sidekick when it was first announced in 2025, and now, after trying it for three weeks, I can say that my sourdough-baking dry spell has finally come to an end, perhaps even permanently.
Sourdough Sidekick, pictured here with the optional Crock Grip Band ($15)
The Sidekick is a Mr. Coffee-sized appliance with a built-in water reservoir, flour hopper, and glass crock with a stirring-paddle lid. I deal with an awful lot of apps in my job, and the Sidekick uses GE’s generic SmartHQ for GE appliances, which isn’t specific to this device and seemed optional. I admit I couldn’t be bothered with an unnecessary app, so I didn’t download it.
Instead, I followed the directions in the included Quick Start Guide booklet, which indicated that I simply needed to fill the water reservoir and flour hopper, set the current day and time (and the day and time I wanted the starter to be ready—you can choose up to seven days ahead; I chose seven), add a little bit of existing starter, and press “Auto Mode.” Almost immediately, a torrent of flour released from the hopper and began mixing into my seed starter with the stirring paddle. (King Arthur recommends keeping a portion of your starter in the fridge in case things go wrong, and I second this suggestion.)
Oddly, no water was dispensed in this process, so post-mixing, my starter was now in the form of an under-hydrated ball. Over the next few days, it became a larger, drier ball until I finally decided to remove the crock to add a couple of tablespoons of water; as I did, I noticed the reservoir was still at its maximum fill line.
I decided I should probably download the app, where I noticed the Sidekick indicated it needed a firmware update. After the update, the Sidekick began dispensing water during mixing, but I realized I really should have followed the instructions in the main instruction booklet, which calls for using a scale to properly calibrate the amounts of water and flour the machine dispenses.
Theoretically, you should only have to do this once, which is good because it’s an irritatingly lengthy and fiddly process. However, my next attempt (remember when I mentioned saving some starter in the fridge?) went much better, properly dispensing 30 grams each of water and flour each day and initiating a stirring cycle every two hours. It starts with a loud beep, then the paddle begins a loud mechanical whir, and for the first few days this can be quite startling, especially if you’re in the same room when it happens.
You can bypass the every-two-hours stirring cycle via the onboard controls, but since the stirring’s purpose is to knock down the starter’s volume and reincorporate any unconsumed flour, I kept it on. (For what it’s worth, I did think the paddle, an update from the Sidekick’s first design, did a pretty good job of incorporating all of the flour and water each time it mixed.)