Sourdough Baking

A new sourdough starter often smells like nail polish remover on Day 3 and looks dead on Day 4. This is normal. Follow the day-by-day process for 7-14 days until you have a reliable starter.

The float test is unreliable. A healthy starter should double in 4-8 hours at 70-75°F and repeat that performance for 2-3 feedings.

A well-maintained sourdough starter lasts indefinitely. Miss 2–3 days at room temperature and quality drops fast; dried flakes last 1–2 years; reactivation usually takes 3–7 days.

Sourdough discard isn't waste by nature. It's a math problem. Learn why you have too much discard and how to stop creating it in the first place.

Bulk fermentation ends at 50–75% rise at typical room temperature — less when warm, more when cool. At 76°F with 20% starter, bulk typically takes 4–5 hours.

At 78°F, bulk fermentation takes 3–4 hours. At 65°F, the same dough needs 8–12 hours. Temperature is the single variable that changes bulk fermentation time the most — here's the complete chart and how to read your dough when the numbers don't match.

Cold proofing (overnight in the refrigerator) produces more acetic acid — sharper, more complex flavor and better scoring. Room temperature proofing is faster but gives you a shorter window before overproofing. Here's the difference in flavor, timing, and technique.

Starter percentage changes sourdough timing fast. At 76°F, 6% starter often wants 6-7 hours, while 30% starter can move in 3-4.

Confused by baker's percentages? Learn the simple math behind sourdough hydration, scaling, and recipe design using shared baselines like 72% hydration, 2% salt, and 20% starter.

A banneton improves dough structure before baking. A loaf pan controls shape during baking. If your dough is above roughly 75% hydration, banneton support matters more; lower-hydration doughs are more forgiving in a loaf pan.

Scoring controls where your sourdough expands in the oven. Skip it and the loaf bursts randomly at its weakest point, producing dense, uneven crumb. Here's the tool, the angle, the depth, and the pattern — with what went wrong on my first dozen attempts.

Learn how the sourdough poke test works: press about 1.3 cm deep, expect perfect dough to spring back in 2–5 seconds, and treat 80%+ hydration doughs differently.

Sourdough bread stored in the refrigerator goes stale faster than bread left on the counter. The fridge temperature (35–40°F) is the exact sweet spot for starch retrogradation — the process that makes bread hard and dry. Here's what actually works: counter for 2–3 days, freezer for anything beyond that.

Think higher hydration automatically equals open crumb? Wrong. Learn why flour strength, fermentation, and structure matter more than water percentage — especially once you move past 75% into the 80%+ range.

Open crumb isn't about luck — it's about hydration. Learn how water affects gluten structure and why the shared sweet spot often sits around 75–80% hydration for airy sourdough.

Sourdough failed? Diagnose flat, dense, too-sour, or gummy loaves — the 65°F low-temperature line, the FQ acidity map, the pH 4.6 safety threshold, and the 5-cause flat-loaf table.