Monitoring the Fermentation of Sourdough Starter with Computer Vision

Monitoring the Fermentation of Sourdough Starter with Computer Vision(justinmklam.com)

99 points by thehaikuza 7 years ago | 27 comments

soperj 7 years ago |

There's nothing arduous about bread making when you use a slow rise. I make bread and pizza dough and bagels several times a week, for couple reasons: a. it's bloody cheap, b. it's damn easy for how good it is. The process is literally stir the ingredients together and put a lid on it for about a day. 8 bagels, 3 pizzas, or a nice loaf of sourdough cost about 27 cents total.

Just go down to your local library and get My Bread by Jim Lahey.

anitil 7 years ago | |

I'm not as prolific as you are, but I bake fairly regularly, and its the perfect hobby for me. Nice and relaxed, with a tasty outcome.

While I haven't read it myself, on /r/breadit there's also a lot of love for 'Flour Water Salt Yeast' as well.

abritinthebay 7 years ago | |

A day seems long? I’ve not noticed any appreciable difference past 3 hours.

Curious as to why you leave it this long...

Trisell 7 years ago | | |

We make ours at night right before bed. Using a very small amount of yeast, we let it ferment/rise for 12 or so hours and then knock it down and rise for 2-3 more hours and into the oven.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread

soperj 7 years ago | | |

Personally notice a big taste difference, but even if that wasn't there, it's cheaper since you use significantly less yeast.

contingencies 7 years ago |

Very cool. Recently I was shown a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint in Shenzhen founded by a Canadian Chinese. It had the best dough in town as voted by a geographically disparate set of Italians, and IMHO beat (and conflicts with) the output of the dough method of my buddy who is a Parisian-trained patissier to a gulf state royal family, https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/life-changing-pizza-dou...

cardamomo 7 years ago |

This seems like an appropriate place to plug Sourdough: A Novel, by Robin Sloan (who also wrote Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore). It's a really delightful read that lovingly satirizes many aspects of San Francisco's contemporary culture while telling the story of a coder turned baker who is on a mission to teach robotic arms to bake bread.

toomanylogins 7 years ago | |

I came here to say the same thing! Its a great read. Alsothe author runs a nice (infrequent) newsletter which occasionally features some interesting machine learning topics

blacksmith_tb 7 years ago |

I wonder if adding an I2C CO2 monitor might not also provide some insight into how active the starter is - it could be overkill, though, if CV is already doing a good job.

chabes 7 years ago | |

There's a few MQ sensors[1] that would probably work well for something like this. Sensors like the MQ-3[2] are sensitive to alcohol, which could be used to help minimize hooching[3].

There's a great blog post[4] about using MQ sensors for "machine olfaction" to monitor things a human would normally smell with their nose. Definitely worth checking out!

[1]https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/MQGasSensors

[2]https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Sensors/MQ-3.pdf

[3]https://www.sourdoughhome.com/index.php?content=hooch

[4]http://www.maskau.dk/projects/electronic-nose

arglebarnacle 7 years ago |

"With bread risen with instant dry yeast, it will definitely resemble visual qualities of bread, but the texture and taste will not be comparable to bread that uses wild yeast."

This is so wrong it drives me insane. The key thing is the length (and thus slowness) of the rise of the dough, not whether you use wild or instant yeast. Sourdough raised on a hot countertop for thirty minutes will not be nearly as good as a dough with a reduced amount of instant yeast raised at a cool temperature for three hours. The idea that all non-sourdough has poor flavor and texture is pure opinion, and silly at that. Any serious bread baker would tell you that that there are many many wonderful breads made with instant yeast--take the French baguette for example.

oraknabo 7 years ago | |

While you're right that good breads can be made with both types of yeast, there are definitely flavors you wouldn't be able to achieve with instant yeast because a live starter is often a much more complex mix of microorganisms while dry & instant yeast are more homogeneous.

southerndrift 7 years ago | |

from [1]

>Sourdoughs International is a family business dedicated to the resurgence of authentic sourdoughs. Authentic? Commercial yeast produces something that looks like sourdough but is completely bland and tasteless. Absolutely nothing tastes or smells anything like authentic sourdough. When you bake it with wild yeast and lactobacilli, it will taste and smell like sourdough should. There is no other way.

>The Industrial Revolution created fast rising yeasts that almost eliminated sourdough and did eliminate the lactic acid bacteria. As a result breads baked with commercial yeast have never equaled the flavor, texture and aroma of man’s first leavened bread. And never will!

That could explain the difference in taste.

[1]http://www.sourdo.com/

progr4mmatic 7 years ago |

Cool read. Just found out about sci-kit this weekend. Computer vision is fascinating. Just coding a simple binary filter makes you appreciate the Herculean amount of parallel processes going on in your noggin...

anfractuosity 7 years ago |

That's really interesting! I love the animated visualisation with the graph & starter. I bet you could use the same approach to watch how the dough grows while proving too.

I found out about this book set recently - http://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-bread/ which is written by an ex-CTO of Microsoft apparently.

It's a bit out of my price range at the moment though ;)

ForHackernews 7 years ago |

Reminds me of "Sourdough", a novel about a software engineer who becomes a baker: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024-sourdough

stephengillie 7 years ago | |

Another poster in this thread was reminded of this book, about 3 hours earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397791

tait 7 years ago |

The article claims that “People have survived for centuries off this staple consisting only of flour, water, salt, and yeast.”

I’d like to challenge this assertion. Can anybody name even one person who has survived for centuries off bread?

overcast 7 years ago | |

Ok Tait the Destroyer. It's not literally meant to be read as a single person living for hundreds of years on a bread diet.

tomjakubowski 7 years ago | |

I think it is absolutely fair to say that many, many people in the age of agriculture would not have survived if not for bread providing the bulk of their caloric needs. It seems unlikely that a pre-industrial agricultural society could even exist without bread or something like it. That's what it means for a food to be a "staple"; it is the crucial backbone of the person's or culture's diet.

knicholes 7 years ago | |

Obviously the world is unaware of anyone who has survived for centuries off of any food source. I think they meant to say, if you insist on being so very specific, "For centuries, within a typical human lifespan, individuals have survived by eating this diet."

anjc 7 years ago | |

The sentence you quoted was very precisely worded:

https://i.imgur.com/4n59IWT.jpg