The Crumb
A bake journal that reads your loaf and tells you what the crumb means.
Sourdough has a slow feedback loop — change one variable, wait, observe, repeat. For new bakers it can be overwhelming and hard to know what went wrong when your loaf doesn't turn out as expected. With TheCrumb, users can log a bake, photograph the loaf, and get a structured read on timing, fermentation, crust and shaping, scored against the numbers, starter, and ingredients you actually used. in addition to the journal, I build several useful educational baking related experiments — a fermentation activity curve, a live starter ecosystem, a bulk fermentation simulator — that help explain why the loaf turned out the way it did. Owned product from start to finish. Product, design, front end, backend and deployment.
The problem
A million things can go wrong when you bake sourdough. Advice online is confident, contradictory and untethered from your kitchen. Not everyone has a friend who bakes sourdough they can call. The Crumb closes it.
Product decisions
The verdict is always tied to the bake's own variables, never generic advice. Scores are coarse on purpose — out of ten, four axes — so the tool reads as a second opinion, not a grade.
Tech
Claude Vision reads the crumb photos against the logged parameters. React and Tailwind front end, Hono API, PostgreSQL, deployed on Railway in Docker.