Hi, I’m Chef Azo. I’ve been baking for 15 years, and I’m based in the United Arab Emirates. Coolaid Blog is where I share what those years have taught me: practical guides for home bakers and a set of free calculators that take the guesswork out of the numbers.
Why I built this site
I built Coolaid Blog to share my experience and ideas with other bakers. Over the years I’ve been asked the same questions again and again. How much starter should I use? Why did my loaf come out flat? How many grams is a cup of flour? How much dough do I need for this tin? The answers are rarely complicated, but they tend to be scattered across old notebooks, recipe margins and memory.
This site puts them in one place, written the way I would explain them to a friend standing next to me in the kitchen.
A little about my baking
The thing I bake most is croissants. They are unforgiving, and that is part of why I love them: the butter, the dough temperature and the timing all have to line up. My favorite bake is a pecan salted caramel croissant, which is every bit as indulgent as it sounds.
My biggest failures came at the beginning, as they do for most bakers. I learned more from those early bakes that went wrong than from the ones that worked, and many of the guides here were written with those beginner mistakes in mind. If something went wrong in your kitchen, there’s a good chance I’ve been there too.
What you’ll find here
- Baking calculators. Tools for sourdough hydration, starter feeding, levain builds, bulk fermentation times, baking schedules, pizza dough, baker’s percentages, cups to grams, butter, oven temperatures, yeast conversions, pan sizes and recipe scaling. You’ll find them all on the tools page.
- Guides. Practical articles on sourdough, bread and pizza dough, and baking conversions, from troubleshooting a dense loaf to converting a recipe for a different pan. They’re all on the blog.
The guides and calculators are designed to work together. When an article explains a calculation, the matching calculator is usually right there in the page, so you can try it with your own numbers.
How the calculators are built and checked
Every calculator is based on standard baking formulas: baker’s percentages, the flour and water inside a sourdough starter, pan volumes and areas, published ingredient weight charts and standard oven temperature conversions. The fermentation tools use a simple temperature model calibrated to common baking guides, because no formula can know your starter or your kitchen exactly.
Before a calculator goes live, I test it against known examples, such as standard recipes and published conversion charts, and check that its results make sense at the extremes. When a result is an estimate rather than an exact conversion, the calculator says so, usually with a range and a reminder to judge the dough rather than the clock. The worked examples in the guides are run through the real calculators, so the numbers you read in an article are the numbers you’ll get.
If you ever get a result that looks wrong, please tell me. Every report helps make the tools better for everyone.
About the images
Some illustrative images on this site are AI-generated. They show general scenes, such as a bowl of flour or a loaf on a board, to make the guides easier to follow. Photos of my own bakes are marked as mine, so you always know which is which.
Get in touch
Questions, calculator problems and ideas for new tools are always welcome. You can reach me through the contact page or by email at [email protected].
Happy baking,
Chef Azo