King Arthur Baking Company announced Tuesday the launch of the Sourdough Sidekick, a WiFi-enabled countertop appliance designed to eliminate the agonizing, labor-intensive hours bakers currently spend completely ignoring their dough.
The $200 device aims to disrupt the traditional artisanal baking process by utilizing a suite of ambient environmental sensors to automate natural fermentation. According to the product roadmap, the Sidekick takes over the most tedious aspects of sourdough maintenance, successfully shielding users from the primitive, manual chore of placing a damp towel over a bowl and walking into another room.
For centuries, amateur bakers have been forced to manually abandon their kitchens and go about their daily lives while wild yeast slowly ferments.
Integrated with a companion smartphone app, the Sidekick provides real-time telemetry on the dough's progress as it sits entirely motionless. The onboard sensors track minute fluctuations in humidity and temperature, generating a dynamic chart of the starter doing exactly what it would have done on a standard windowsill. When the wild yeast reaches peak fermentation, the device triggers a push notification alerting the user that the mixture has successfully continued to be left alone, preventing the baker from having to guess whether the flour is still sitting in the dark.
Early beta testers report the gadget has revolutionized their weekends, freeing up vital hours previously lost to not looking at a glass jar. At press time, King Arthur engineers were reportedly dogfooding a next-generation $400 premium model capable of seamlessly eliminating the remaining steps of the hobby by deploying an already baked loaf directly to the user's porch via a third-party delivery driver.