Sourdough Starter: Fermento

Your sourdough starter is alive. Fermento treats it that way.

Klaus — or whatever you name yours — has a face. Leave him too long and he looks hungry. Feed him and he beams. It sounds silly right up until you realise you haven't killed a starter in months.

A PHOTO INSTEAD OF A GUESS
Hold the jar up to the camera. Bubbie reads the bubbles, how far it climbed, the crust drying on the glass — six things a camera can genuinely judge, not ten invented ones. Then she says what it means for your next feed, and moves it. Photograph a cut loaf and she reads the crumb the same way.

SIX JARS, ONE SHELF
Sourdough starter, brine pickles, kombucha, kraut and kimchi, yogurt and kefir, ginger bug. Each gets its own character, rhythm and checklist.

FROM FLOUR AND WATER
Three day-by-day recipes raise a starter from scratch: the grams for each day, and what you should be seeing. Around day four it looks dead in every one of them — Fermento tells you that before you throw it out.

REMINDERS THAT READ THE ROOM
Free jars run on a fixed rhythm you choose. With Plus, tell Fermento how warm your kitchen is and it pulls the next feed forward on hot days, pushes it back when it's cold. Quiet hours are respected — nothing pings you at 3 a.m. Burp reminders for pickles, fizz checks for kombucha, a wake-up when a jar leaves the fridge.

FEED BY THE SCALE
Tell Fermento once what the empty jar weighs and every feed names the number to watch for instead of an amount to guess at. Your jar can hold a blend — 70 % wheat, 30 % wholegrain rye — and Bubbie says whether that ratio carries it to the next feed.

WHEN SOMETHING LOOKS WRONG
Grey liquid on top? White film? No rise? Photograph it, or pick what you see from a list. Bubbie explains what it actually is, and with Plus installs a real fix: a changed ratio, a shorter schedule, a set number of feeds. The jar stays in rescue mode until it's back on track.

IT LEARNS YOUR STARTER
Log a rise and Fermento remembers how long it took. The countdown to the peak is free and runs on your Lock Screen. With Plus it drops the rule of thumb and uses your jar's own measured curve instead.

PLAN A BAKE BACKWARDS
Say when the dough goes together and Fermento names the feed time and the ratio so the starter peaks exactly then. One plan a month is free.

WHEN YOUR HANDS ARE FULL
"Hey Siri, feed my starter in Fermento." A widget and a Control Centre button do the same in one tap. On bake day the step you're in counts down on the Lock Screen.

EVERYTHING YOU DID, KEPT
A calendar that fills itself and, with Plus, a photo timeline per jar and a monthly recap to share. Dough and brine calculators. Discard recipes so nothing goes in the bin. Your whole log exports as CSV — free, because it is your data.

BADGES YOU EARN
Twenty milestones and twenty-one outfits for your jars. None of them can be bought — they only come from actually looking after your ferments.

WHAT LEAVES YOUR IPHONE
No account, no sign-up, no ads, nothing sold on. Your jars, photos and history live on the device and sync through your own iCloud if you want them to. A photo sent for a reading is resized, stripped of its location, and stored nowhere — not on the server, not in a log. The weather heads-up is optional and sends a rounded-off region, never an address. Anonymous counts show where people get stuck; a switch in Settings turns them off.

FERMENTO PLUS
Unlimited jars, full history, the photo readings, the bake planner, rescue plans, temperature-aware reminders, photo timelines and the bake book. Free keeps two jars and 30 days of history.

Fermento is a logbook, not a lab. It won't tell you whether something is safe to eat - when in doubt, throw it out.

Apple Standard EULA: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Terms of Use: https://jonaspolenz368.github.io/Fermento/terms.html
Privacy Policy: https://jonaspolenz368.github.io/Fermento/privacy.html