What is a BakeRun at bakeqee?

We call a single baking session at bakeqee a BakeRun. That's not random wording, it's a deliberate decision. In this article, we explain why.

A BakeRun is everything you document when you bake something once. From mixing the dough through bulk fermentation, shaping, final proof, and baking, all the way to the first slice.

Concretely, a BakeRun contains:

• The recipe you used (or your own version of it)
• The actual amounts you really took
• The timings, meaning when you did what
• Notes, meaning what you noticed, what you'd do differently next time
• Photos of the process and the result
• A rating at the end

So a BakeRun is not a recipe. The recipe is the plan. The BakeRun is the execution. Next time you can take the same plan, but the BakeRun will be a different one.

"Session" sounds to us like yoga, therapy, or a recording studio. Baking isn't a session. It's a concrete activity with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A session also implies that you're sitting through it. When baking, you're more in motion, you do something else in between, you come back. Session doesn't fit.

Too dry. "Entry in the logbook" sounds like administration, like an obligation, like bureaucracy. A BakeRun isn't something you have to record, it's something you do.

That was our original idea. "My last bake was rubbish." Sounds natural, short, good. But: "bake" describes the bread, not the process. If you say "I had 4 bakes this week," it sounds like you produced 4 loaves. With a BakeRun you describe the whole procedure, including the parts where no bread came out.

Besides, there are bakes that end with no result. The dough didn't rise, the crust burned, the bread has a taste not even you would eat. That's still a BakeRun. You did the run, even if the result wasn't something you could show off.

The word comes from two worlds we like.

First, from sport, specifically from Strava. A run is a run. The run counts even if you took a break along the way, even if the pace was bad, even if you stopped early. Strava counts every run.

Second, from building software. A build, a test, a deployment is a run. We know that not every run succeeds. Some fail, some take longer than planned, some produce unexpected results. But every run counts, because there's something to learn from every run.

We liked both concepts and adopted them.

A new BakeRun begins when you tap "New BakeRun" in the app. You pick a recipe (or create a new one), enter what you actually do, add notes and photos during the bake, and finish at the end with a rating.

When you make the same recipe again, that's a new BakeRun. You can compare the two with each other. That's really the whole point: not looking at each bake in isolation, but seeing how they develop.

If the word BakeRun lands with Founding Members, if it feels natural, if it shows up in conversations among bakers without anyone asking "what's that," then we've hit on the right thing. If not, we'll change it.

We're not in love with the word. We're in love with the concept. The concept is: every bake counts, every bake is a chance to learn, every bake deserves to be documented. If another word carries that better, we'll take the other word.

bakeqee is a notebook and progress tracker for baking. We're building it right now.