Jennifer Mackey-Mary: 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’ll 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. 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 Mackey Mary, I’m a wardrobe stylist who’s been dressing everyday women for over 20 years, and 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.

In order to truly understand today’s episode, I feel I have to share a couple of important details about myself.

First, I love TikTok. Like I really, deeply, truly 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 golden retrievers and babies. It has everything, and the half a day it was down was rough for me. So there’s that. 

The second thing is, I am easily influenced. I can’t tell you how many presents under the Christmas tree were from the TikTok shop. I should probably be really embarrassed for admitting that, but I’m not. There’s good stuff on there. The African net sponge? Amazing. The cheese grater with 5 different blades that replaces my dangerous mandolin? Life changing. Anyway, the intersection of these two facts is how we ended up here. 

Early in the year, every single video that came across my for you page was people baking these beautiful loves of bread that looked delicious. And I don’t know why, but I thought–yes–I’m going to do that. I’m going to be like those women with perfectly clean kitchens turning out homemade bread for their probably very appreciative families. 

Again, I don’t know why I thought this was something I should do. I’m 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. Now, I will doctor up that boxed mix, and it will probably turn out ok, but I have no interest in being a from-scratch baker. None. 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. 

Now 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, here’s a little tip. Every time I say sourdough, you think style. Here we go.

Like I said For some reason or other, I didn’t examine my motives that deeply, I decided that baking sourdough was important to me. It was a thing I wanted not only to do, but to do well. I wanted to turn out beautiful loaves of bread that impressed the heck out of people. 

I started by watching all the sourdough videos coming across my FYP–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 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.

During this time, I thought, if you’re going to bake sourdough, you’re going to need the right supplies. Since this was 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 didn’t want to wait weeks to get going. I bought the deluxe sourdough kit with multiple bannetons, a special jar, bread slings in different shapes, 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 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 the algorithm served up. So I just watched more, to see if there was a consensus. I also got overwhelmed by the time it seemed to take. What do you mean it takes 3 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 baking supplies arrived…and then just sat there. I didn’t even open the box because I was too afraid to get started. I’ve 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 money and time, get bored, and quit. You’ve done this a hundred times. Remember when you were going to start knitting? What happened with that? Remember the book you outlined, but never started? 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 that. 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”. 

So there I was, over sixty dollars 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 I sent an email in January about quitter’s day, which is my 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. I gave two examples of quitting things–going to the gym at 5am, and baking sourdough bread. Those weren’t 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 your girl loves to sleep until 7. It's something I have no bad feelings about quitting. On the other hand, quitting sourdough, or the dream of sourdough, was something I felt like I couldn’t do, not that I didn’t want to do, and I wasn’t feeling great about it. 

After I sent that email, I had a little chat with myself and 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 try?”

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–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’re 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, and all the reasons I was going to fail. I needed a little handholding.

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 2oz cup or a 4 oz cup? and what’s the best feeding ratio for my starter 1:1:1, or 1:22? Should I be using bread flour or all-purpose–or a mixture of both?  Are stretch and folds or coil folds better?” If none of that made sense to you, it’s ok. 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 said things like, I don’t do the aliquot method. 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 day at the exact same time, carefully measuring each gram of flour and water. Heck, she even used a recipe with cups and tablespoons instead of grams, which is kind of verboten 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 give the sourdough groups a 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 personal. 

Now, 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”. But the voice of a boss I had long long 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.

She showed us how to start a Sourdough starter from scratch, how to mix the dough and adjust for different temperatures and humidity levels, how to shape and score the 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 info that was overwhelming me. 

I left the class with a mini loaf of bread that I’d baked myself. The shape was a little wonky, but what the heck, I’d made bread, kind of.

I walked out to my car, and had a 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 instructors way, is that sourdough doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it–and that its actually kind of hard to screw up. You 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 “That depends on your house, or that depends on your oven, or that’s up to you”. I had this little moment there of being outside myself and understanding how when I say things like that to our Style Circle members, it must be infuriating, or at least sound really unhelpful, but in the end, it’s true. Lots of times, it just depends, or there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. 

Over the next couple of days, armed with just enough knowledge to take the fear of failure down a notch, I got started. I fed my starter, and mixed the dough. I bulk fermented and shaped, and proofed, and scored, and 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. 

No one was as shocked as I was when in the end, I had a perfect loaf of sourdough bread. And maybe I should amend that, because it was a little dark on the bottom, and my scoring wasn’t pretty, but for a first try? I was pretty impressed with myself.

Since that loaf, I’ve baked so much delicious bread–I’m not burning the bottoms anymore and they’re getting prettier all the time. I’m getting less messy, too. In general, I’m a messy cook, and in the beginning, I had starter dripping from the cabinets, and flour all over the floor. I used every bowl we own, and had so many dishes that I wondered if store-bought bread really was the better option. 

Now though, I have a process that works for me, and my kitchen doesn’t look like a baking horror show. I’m not stressed by the clock or by timing, and I’m experimenting with different flavors and shapes–I’ve made bread bowls for soup, Hawaiian rolls, cinnamon swirl bread, and a loaf of chocolate chocolate chip. 

That’s not to say there haven’t some failures and setbacks. Ever had your oven die just as you’re about to bake dough that’s been waiting for 2 days? I had a moment of sadness, then I took it over to my sisters house and taught her to bake sourdough. One night I left the house and forgot to put my dough that had been rising on the counter into the fridge. I came home to dough that had exploded out of it’s bowl all over the counter, and was now a soupy wet mess. Every google search and sourdough Facebook group told me it was ruined and I should throw it away, but I remembered my instructor saying, “if it gets too wet and runny to shape it, just put it in a loaf pan” 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.

I’ve found my personal sourdough sweet spot is somewhere between my instructor's “Don’t do any of the things, it will 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 the 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 earned them. 

My proudest accomplishment is Since I took that class, I haven’t bought a single loaf of bread. 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 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 you if didn’t here are 5 lessons I’d like you to take away from my sourdough journey.

1 First of all, the fear of failure often keeps us from getting started. A few months ago, we had Tara Mohr on the show to talk about her book, playing big–If you haven’t listened to it, we’ll link it in the show notes. 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 an out.  

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 just convince ourselves that store-bought bread is good enough or what we wear doesn’t matter, and just push what we really want aside, leaving us feeling 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

2 Knowledge only takes you so far. You have to actually practice. 

When we’re faced with something new, sometimes we feel like all you have to do is learn how to do everything perfectly, and then there’s no way you can fail. So we watch more videos, listen to more podcasts, follow more influencers, trying to learn everything there is to know so we can’t 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 the bike, and maybe fall a couple of times, you don’t actually know how to ride a bike, you know what I’m saying? 

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. 

Practice is an incredible teacher, and here’s the funny thing–failure is a much better teacher than success. That almost perfect first loaf I baked taught me nothing. The soupy wet dough that I was able to salvage taught me a lot. Same thing with style. A successful outfit doesn’t force you to think about anything. But an outfit that makes you feel frumpy and lumpy? That’s a great teacher.

I think we feel like if we can learn everything before we start, we’ll be confident, and then we’ll be successful. But it doesn’t work that way. 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 dinner, you have to have the courage. Confidence will come in time, but you’ll never get it if you don’t 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 can easily make you feel like you’re drowning. 

What I paid for wasn’t the knowledge, it was the methodology, and a 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. 

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 totally believe in taking the bits of advice that work for you from different sources, when you’re new, you don’t enough knowledge to filter the advice. 

For example, let’s say you’re a woman with an apple-shaped body. One influencer is telling you 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 because they show off your legs, while another is telling you 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. But that deeper understanding and knowledge is often overshadowed by the all the oversimplified “wear this, not that” free advice that’s out there. Without the foundational knowledge, you can get overwhelmed by all the conflicting advice.

Which brings me to the 4th lesson I’d like you to take away. Often the conflicting advice comes because of conflicting approaches..in the case of my sourdough, it was do all the things or it won’t turn out, or do none of the things, and it will probably still turn out. I think the style parallel is pretty clear here, but what I want to say 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 want more rules and checklists. I’ve had people join because our approach to style isn’t rule-based and dogmatic. 

For me, 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. Those people probably enjoy counting the number of accessory points they’re wearing, and following the body type rules perfectly. Good for them, but they’d probably dislike me, and my sourdough instructor. And that’s ok because there are plenty of people out there who teach a more rigid, technical way. 

It doesn’t matter where, or from whom, you’re getting advice–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 you.

The final takeaway for the day, and that is, #5 The tools won’t make you successful.

Look, I get it. When you start something new, it feels like buying stuff, whether that’s new clothes, or bread-proofing bowls, will jumpstart something, or make it easier, or make you want to get started. But they don’t. Success doesn’t start with a shopping trip. When you START with a shopping trip, you buy things other people tell you you need, or what you think you should have, and 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.

Now, I know there are women listening 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 to your closet right now and make at least 10 cute outfits. And if I couldn’t, I could make you a list of EXACTLY what you need to add to your wardrobe. 

Use what you have until you know what you need, AND don’t expect more clothes to give you a desire you don’t have right now. Buying heels will not make you want to wear heels. Start with where you are and what you have and what you like, and then add pieces that help you get to the next level. 

Success never starts with a shopping trip–don’t forget that.


There you have it friends - 5 Style Lessons I learned from baking sourdough bread. But wait, I have a bonus lesson for you, 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 stop talking about bread. And first, I have to point out that you listened 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 has 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. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to become a 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 other’s opinions or even your own inner critic. 

I hope this episode has given you some food for thought when it comes to learning any new skill, but particularly improving your style. The biggest takeaway for me would be, 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’ll see you next time–and until then, remember that your everyday matters, so get dressed for it!

Jennifer Mackey-Mary [outro]: 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 Styles. 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 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 gonna wear. Come join me and make your everyday style easier.