Jennifer Macky (0:00)

If you read the title of this episode, you might have thought, what the heck does sourdough bread have to do with style? And on the surface, nothing, I will grant you that. But I've been on a quest to learn how to bake good sourdough bread this year and it turns out there's a lot to be learned about style from my carbohydrate fueled journey. And today I'm going to share it with you. So let's get started. Hello, gorgeous. Welcome back to the Everyday Style School, the podcast that gives real life style advice to real life women. I'm your host, Jennifer Macky. Mary. I'm a wardrobe stylist who's been dressing everyday Women for over 25 years. And I'm the founder of Everyday Style, where we're on a mission to inspire women to love the way they look and give you the tools to make getting dressed easy. Friends. In order to truly understand today's episode, I feel like I have to share a couple of important details about myself. You know, I usually like to focus on just the style and the advice and the information, but today I got to pull back the curtain a little bit. First of all, you need to know that I love TikTok. I love it like I really, truly, deeply, madly love TikTok. It's my entertainment, my daily brain break. And I don't know where else you can see videos of important things happening around the world interspersed with videos of like golden retrievers and parrots and babies. It has everything. And the half a day it was down in January was really rough on me. So there's that. That's the first thing. The second thing is I am easily influenced. I can't tell you how many presents under the Christmas tree last year were from the TikTok shop. And I should probably be embarrassed for admitting that, but I'm not. There's really good stuff on there. That African nut sponge. Amazing. The cheese grater with five different blades that replaces my dangerous mandolin. Life changing. Anyway, the intersection of these two facts is how we ended up here today. So late last year, every single video that came across my for you page was people baking these beautiful loaves of bread that look delicious. And I don't know why, but I thought, yes, I'm going to do that. I'm going to be like these women with perfectly clean kitchens turning out homemade bread for their probably very appreciative families. And again, I don't know why this is something I thought I should do. I am not a baker. I can cook but the exactness of baking terrifies me. If I bake you a cake, there is a 100% chance that a box was involved. I will doctor up that box mix. It'll probably turn out all right. But I have no interest in being a from scratch baker. Absolutely not. But I got it in my head that I was going to bake bread from scratch. And thus began the great sourdough adventure of 2025. So from here on out, I'm just going to tell you my sourdough story and at the end, I'll recap some of the key lessons. If you're not sure what you're supposed to be getting out of this episode along the way, and you're like, why is she talking about bread? Here is a little tip. Every time I say sourdough, you think style. Here we go. As I mentioned before, for some reason or other, and I didn't examine my motives that deeply, I decided that baking sourdough bread was important to me. It was a thing I wanted not only to do, but to do really well. I wanted to turn out beautiful loaves of bread that impressed the heck out of people. Maybe that was it. Maybe I just wanted to impress people. I don't know. It started all very innocently, just watching the sourdough videos coming across my for you page. And if you know anything about TikTok's algorithm, you know that the more you watch, the more TikTok is going to give you. What started out as a sourdough video here and there quickly became a tsunami of sourdough videos. And I watched them all. I didn't even speed them up. I saved a ton of them. Videos with recipes, videos with detailed timestamps of the process, videos of professional level scoring techniques. That's when you make those pretty designs on top. And during this time, I thought, if you're going to bake sourdough, you're going to need the right equipment. Since this was all new to me, I figured I'd better buy all the things the sourdough gurus were telling me I needed. I decided to buy a dehydrated starter because I'm impatient and I didn't want to wait weeks to get going. I also bought the deluxe sourdough kit with multiple bannetons, a special jar, bread slings in different shapes and sizes, a special flour sifter. If the successful sourdough people had it, then by God, so would I. While I waited for everything to arrive, I watched and I saved more videos. But the more I watched and the more I learned about sourdough, the more overwhelmed I became. It felt like everyone had their own method. And what one sourdough expert said was contradicted by the very next video that the algorithm served up. So I just watched more to see if there was a consensus to try and make sense out of all of it. I also got overwhelmed by the time it seemed to take like. What do you mean? It takes three days to bake a loaf of bread and you have to time everything perfectly. When am I supposed to sleep? It all got to be so much. My starter and my baking supplies arrived and, and then they just sat there. I didn't even open the box because I was too afraid to get started. And I have never been paralyzed by bread before. But there we were. Then a funny thing happened. My inner critic showed up to tell me all the reasons I wasn't going to be able to make a decent loaf of sourdough. And it sounded a little something like this. Jennifer, what are you doing? You know you're not going to keep up with this. Your ADHD is at it again. You're going to go all in, spend a ton of time, a ton of money, then get bored and quit. You have done this a hundred times. Remember when you were going to start knitting? What happened with that? Remember that book you outlined but never started? No, no. The other book you outlined but never started. You know your sister is the baker in the family. She could do this. You should just stick to making salads and appetizers. You're good at those. You can probably still return the supplies. You haven't even opened them yet. Besides, what's so bad about store bought bread? It's perfectly fine. Homemade sourdough doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Yep. So there I was, over $60 into my sourdough journey, confused and overwhelmed, convinced I wasn't born with the sourdough gene and I hadn't even touched a gram of flour. I pretty much decided it was over before it began because I just wasn't cut out to bake sourdough bread. If you're on my email list, you might remember that I sent an email in January about Quitters Day, which is my very favorite of all the made up holidays. It's in mid January and it's the date when most people have given up on their New Year's resolutions. And in that email I gave two examples of quitting things. Number one, going to the gym at 5am and number two, baking sourdough bread. Those were not just random. I have in fact quit going to the gym at 5am I just don't like it anymore. My internal body clock has changed and now I like to sleep in a little bit more. I don't have any bad feelings about quitting. On the other hand, quitting sourdough or at that point, just the dream of making sourdough was something I felt like I couldn't do and not that I didn't want to do and I wasn't feeling great about it. And so after I sent that email, I had a little chat with myself and I said, look self, you're either going to do this or you're not. Sourdough isn't that deep, but for some reason you've decided it matters so why not just give it a try? And then I did the thing I should have done all along. I found and signed up for a class. A class that, yes, added to my investment in my sourdough adventure. And you might be thinking, well, why would you do that? You could have just watched more sourdough TikToks and YouTube videos and gotten the same information for free. And you are not wrong. But here's the thing. What I needed was someone to show me step by step how to do it, to answer my questions, to allow me to get my hands on some dough Instead of just thinking about it in my head and thinking about all the reasons that I was going to fail. I just needed a little bit of hand holding. I arrived at the class with my head filled with technical sourdough knowledge and a list of questions like when you're doing the Aliquot method, should you use a two ounce cup or a four ounce cup? And what's the best feeding ratio for my starter? 111 or 122 or maybe a 155? Should I be using bread flour or all purpose flour or is a mixture of both better? Are stretch and folds or coil folds better? Now, if none of that made any sense to you, it's okay. The point is, I knew a lot about sourdough for someone who hadn't even taken the container of flour out of her pantry. Pretty much every time I asked a question, the instructor looked at me like I had two heads and she said things like yeah, I don't do the Aliquot method and I don't follow a feeding ratio. I just kind of eyeball it. I use whatever flour I have on hand. I don't usually do any kind of folds. Her approach to sourdough was completely different from Every other guru or influencer I'd been watching, she didn't watch the clock or use fancy equipment. She left her dough in the fridge for days until it was convenient for her. She wasn't feeding and discarding her starter every single day at the exact same time, carefully measuring each gram of flour and water. She even used a recipe with cups and tablespoons instead of grams, which is kind of wild in the sourdough community. No self respecting baker would dare. And get this, she used tap water, not filtered or bottled water, which again would have given the sourdough gurus an absolute heart attack. But there she was saying things like, sourdough isn't that complicated. It's just flour, water and salt and your entire day can't revolve around your sourdough. It has to work for your life and use what you have and don't spend money on things you don't need. That one felt a little personal at first. I was not happy with her whole just try it, see what happens approach inside. I was like, lady, I paid you to teach me how to bake perfect sourdough every time. What is this it's not so hard attitude? Of course it's hard. I've watched a million TikTok videos of failed sourdough. I have proof that it's hard. But the voice of a boss that I had a long, long time ago popped into my head saying trust the process until you see the results. And I decided that if this woman's method was good enough to bake bread that people actually buy, I could probably learn a thing or two. So I shut up and let her do her thing. She showed us how to start a sourdough starting from scratch. How to mix the dough and adjust for different temperatures and humidity levels in your house, and how to shape and score dough and what to do if your dough has been over fermented or over proofed and how to tell if it's done. All the basics I needed to get started without any of the PhD level information that was overwhelming me. I left the class that day with a mini loaf of bread that I had kind of baked myself. The shape was a little bit wonky, but what the heck, I had made bread kind of. I walked out to my car and I had this little epiphany which turned into the idea for this show. And that is, there are two schools of thought on sourdough. One says that sourdough is a highly technical and temperamental thing and there are a million ways for it to fail. So you have to follow all the rules perfectly. The other way of thinking, clearly, my instructor's way of thinking is that sourdough doesn't have to be as hard as we make it, and that it's actually kind of hard to screw it up. You just need to know a few basic principles. But after that, it's about experimenting, practicing, and discovering what works for you. In the class, when someone would ask a question, she'd often say, well, that depends on your house, or that depends on your oven, or that's up to you. I had this little moment in the class of being outside myself and understanding how when I say things like that to our Style Circle members in our coaching, in our chats, it must be a little infuriating or at least sound really unhelpful. But in the end, it's true. A lot of times it does just depend and there isn't a one size fits all answer. Over the next few days, armed with just enough knowledge to take the fear of failure down a notch, I got started. I fed my starter, I mixed the dough, I bulk fermented, I shaped approved, I scored, and I baked every step of the way, feeling like I was doing something wrong. And my sourdough loaf probably wasn't going to turn out, but I just had to start somewhere. And no one was as shocked as I was when in the end I had a perfect loaf of sourdough bread. And maybe I should have meant that a little bit because the bottom was a little bit dark. But in my scoring it was not pretty. But for a first try, I was pretty impressed with myself. It was absolutely edible and even delicious. And since that loaf, I have baked so much delicious bread, I'm not burning the bottoms anymore and my loaves are getting prettier all the time. I'm getting less messy too. In general, I'm a really messy cook and in the beginning I had like starter dripping from the cabinets and flour all over the floor. I used every bowl we own. I had so many dishes that I wondered if store bought bread really was a better option. Now, though, I have a process that works for me and my kitchen no longer looks like a baking horror show. I'm not stressed by the clock or by timing even, and I'm experimenting with different flavors and shapes. I've made bread bowls for soup, and I've made Hawaiian rolls, cinnamon swirl bread and a loaf of chocolate chocolate chip that was as good as it sounds. But that is not to say that there haven't been some failures and some setbacks have you ever had your oven died just as you're about to bake dough that's been waiting for two days? I had a moment of sadness and then I took it over to my sister's house and I taught her how to bake sourdough. One night I left the house and forgot to put my dough that had been rising on the countertop into the fridge and I came home to dough that had exploded out of its bowl all over the counter and now was just this like soupy, wet mess. Every Google search and every sourdough Facebook group told me it was ruined and I should just throw it out. But I remembered my instructor saying if it gets too wet and runny to shape it, just throw it in a loaf pan. And I did and made amazing sandwich bread. One time I forgot to put salt in a batch of dough and there's no happy resolution there. It was just terrible. But it was one out of many. I have found my personal sourdough sweet spot and it's somewhere between my instructors don't do any of the things it'll be fine and the typical you must do all the things or it won't be fine. Other than more flour, I haven't bought a single sourdough supply or tool. I realized I don't need that perfect aesthetic storage container or a Danish dough whisk with a longer handle. I'm getting great results with what I already have. I did reward myself with a pair of pretty oven mitts that make me happy because we all know how I feel about buying things that make you smile and I think I've earned them. But my proudest accomplishment is that since I took that class, I have not bought a single loaf of bread. Now, I probably haven't hit my financial break even point yet, but I'm on my way. And that was never the point. Anyway, I did what I set out to do and I didn't give up and I've been successful. And that concludes the story of how my sourdough empire started. Hopefully you were able to pick out some important style parallels from my story, but if you didn't, here are five lessons I'd like you to take away from my experience. First of all, the fear of failure often keeps us from getting started. A few months ago we had Tara Moore on the show to talk about her book Playing Big and if you haven't listened to that episode yet, we will link it in the show notes. She is just amazing, but one of the things she talks about in her book is the concept of the inner critic. And because I've read that book over and over, I've gotten good at recognizing when my inner critic shows up. I haven't fully been able to stop her, but I know when she's there. So I was aware of what was happening when I started having those thoughts of, this is going to be a disaster. You never follow through. You're not going to be good at this. That was my fear showing up, and my inner critic was giving me a way out. If you just quit, you don't have to face fear. I see this happen with women all the time. When it comes to style, my body is too weird to dress well. I'm not good at style. I could never wear that. What would people think? The response to this fear is usually one of two things. First, we give in to the fear and the inner critic, and we just convince ourselves that store bought bread is good enough or what we wear doesn't matter and we just push away what we really want, leaving us unfulfilled. Or we believe that we can educate ourselves out of the fear. Which brings me to my second very important style lesson. And that is knowledge only takes you so far. You have to actually practice. When we're faced with something new, sometimes we feel like all we gotta do is learn how to do everything perfectly and then there's no way you can fail. You'll always get it right. So we watch more videos, we listen to more podcasts, follow more influencers trying to learn everything there is to know so we can't screw it up. But the truth is, you can watch all the YouTube videos you want about how to ride a bike, but until you actually get on that bike and maybe fall a few times, you. You don't know how to actually ride a bike. You know what I'm saying? Same thing with style. I'm constantly encouraging our style circle members to take their knowledge out for a walk. Don't just watch the class on how to dress your body shape. Go into your closet and put the principles you just learned into action. Head to a website and look for the clothing elements you just learned about. Practice is an incredible teacher. And here's the really funny thing. Failure is a much better teacher than success. That almost perfect first loaf that I baked taught me nothing. The soupy wet dough that I was able to salvage taught me a lot. And it's the same thing with style. A successful outfit doesn't force you to think about anything but an outfit that makes you look and feel frumpy, dumpy, lumpy, That's a great teacher because you have to use what you have learned to fix it. I think we feel like if we can learn everything before we start, we'll be confident and then we will be successful. But it doesn't work that way. And you've probably heard me say this before. Confidence comes from mastery. Mastery comes from practice. And practice starts with courage. You don't have to have the confidence to try a new trend. You have to have the courage to try something new. You don't have to have the confidence to dress up a little because it makes you feel good. Even though everyone in your family wears pajama pants to Thanksgiving. You just have to have the courage to dress the way you want to dress. Confidence will come in time, but you'll never get there if you don't just start somewhere. The third lesson I want you to take away today is that if you want to learn something new, investing in education is worth it. The Internet is a wonderful place, but the sheer volume of knowledge and resources can hold us back as much as it can propel us forward. Is all the sourdough knowledge you could ever want available on the Internet for free? Yes, just like all the style education you could ever want is on the Internet for free. But the problem is that free advice can be like drinking water from a fire hose. It's just too much coming at you all at once, and it can easily make you feel like you're drowning or overwhelmed. What I paid for wasn't the knowledge. It was the methodology. It was the pathway for getting my flour out of the pantry and turned into bread. I paid for someone to break down exactly what I needed to know to get started without confusing me with all the things that I didn't need to know in the beginning of my journey. Also, when you're getting free advice from multiple sources using different methodologies, you don't know what to do or who to believe or where to start. And While I absolutely 100% believe in taking the bits advice that work for you from different sources, when you're new, you don't have enough knowledge to filter the advice in a helpful way. For example, let's say you're a woman with an apple shaped body, one influencer is telling you that empire waist dresses are your best friend, while another source is telling you those are great if you want to look pregnant. One influencer is telling you skinny jeans are amazing for you because they show off your legs, while another is telling you that they're going to make you look like an ice cream cone. Who do you believe? If you have a foundational knowledge of your body shape and how to dress it best, you know which to believe. You know how to filter that information. But that deeper understanding that foundational knowledge is often overshadowed by all of the oversimplified where this not that free advice that's out there. Without the foundational knowledge, you can easily get overwhelmed by all the conflicting advice. And that brings me to the fourth thing I'd like you to take away. Often the conflicting advice comes because of conflicting approaches. In my case. In the case of Sourdough, it was do all the things or it won't turn out, or do none of the things and it'll probably still turn out. I think the style parallel here is pretty clear. But what I want to say about this is that neither approach is wrong. If it leads to good bread or good style, it's about what works for you. I've had people leave the style circle because they wanted more rules and more checklists. And we've had people join the style circle because our approach to style isn't rule based and dogmatic. For Me Personally, the 37 step method to bread was too hard. I don't want to have to measure the humidity of my home in order to have a sandwich. For some people though, that way works. And those people probably enjoy counting the number of accessory points they're wearing that day and following the body type rules. Perfectly good for them. But they'd probably dislike me. And they'd probably dislike my sourdough instructor. That's just not how we operate. But that's okay, because there are plenty of people out there who do teach a more rigid, technical way. It doesn't matter where or from whom you're getting your advice and your knowledge. What matters is that their approach aligns with yours. If it doesn't, you're going to end up frustrated, feeling like maybe you aren't good at this, which probably isn't the case at all. You just haven't found an approach that meshes with yours. The final takeaway for the day number five is the tools won't make you successful. And this is probably something you've heard me say before. I know we talked about it with Ingrid Jansen. But look, I get it. When you start something new, it feels like buying stuff. Whether it's new clothes or bread proofing bowls. We'll jumpstart something or make it easier or make make you want to get started. But they don't. Success doesn't start with a shopping trip. When you start with that shopping trip. You buy things other people tell you you need or what you think you should have, or the tools that will guarantee your success. But often those purchases end up to be a complete waste. Do you know how many tools I use out of my deluxe 17 piece sourdough kit? 3. I use 3. Everything else I use I already had and works for me better now. I know there are women listening and thinking, but I don't have anything to wear. I'd have to start by shopping. And for a handful of you, that might be true. If you don't have any clothes that fit, yes, you need to shop. But for the vast majority of women feeling like they need to shop in order to have better style, I bet I could come over to your closet right now and make at least 10 cute outfits that you would love. And if I couldn't, I could definitely make you a list of exactly what you need to add to your wardrobe. My advice is to use what you have until you know what you need. And don't expect more clothes or different clothes to give you a desire you don't have right now. Buying heels will never make you want to wear heels. So start with where you are and what you have and what you already like to wear. And then add pieces that help you get get to the next level. Don't buy for the next level. Success never starts with a shopping trip. Don't forget that. All right, there you have it, my friends. Five style lessons I learned from baking sourdough bread. But because I love you, I have one more. A bonus. And that is, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks about what you're interested in. If it matters to you, it matters. You might have listened to this whole episode and thought, it's just bread. Why is she going on and on about it? Please shut up. Stop talking about bread. And first, I have to point out that you listened to all the way to the end, so that's on you, babe. But also, baking bread for my friends and family has been a lot of fun and it's given me a lot of joy. And that matters. There are people who think what you wear doesn't matter, and it's frivolous to care about style. And for them, that's fine. But if it matters to you, it matters. Don't let anyone take that from you. Plus, baking bread without any chemicals has made me aware of how much better real food tastes. And I've started making other things from scratch. And don't worry, this is not going to become some homesteading podcast. But my point is, there's been a ripple effect. Just like dressing better has a ripple effect on how you feel about yourself and how you show up in life, the little things that might seem frivolous often become the big things. So don't get derailed by others opinions or even your own inner critic. I hope this episode has given you some food for thought. No pun intended when it comes to learning any new skill, but particularly improving your style. The biggest takeaway for me, if I could impress one thing upon you, it would be you have to practice. You just have to practice. Learning is important, but actually doing the thing is the only way to master it. That's all the advice I've got for you today. I will see you next time and and until then, remember that your everyday matters. So get dressed for it and that's a wrap. Thank you for listening today. If you're loving the Everyday Style School podcast, I'd like to invite you to become a member of the Style Circle. It's our monthly all access membership that gives you everything we create to make style easy so you can save time and money, have easy, easier mornings and more confidence all day long. You get our seasonal capsule wardrobe guides, all of the master classes we offer, and our exclusive members only podcast the Everyday Style School. Extra credit. Plus you're invited to the Facebook community where you can get even more style support and inspiration. I would love to get to know you and support your style journey. It's just $19 a month less than the cost of a clearance shirt you're never going to wear. Come join me and make your everyday style easier.