Baking timelines for sourdough bread – Creating the right baking timeline for your lifestyle is essential to successful sourdough baking.
Many people want shortcuts, but in truth, shortcuts will often sacrifice the quality of your bread.
What you need is patience – and a sourdough baking schedule!
Creating a baking timeline is all about making sure that you are able to fit the sourdough baking process around your lifestyle.
Whether you work full time, shift work, chase toddlers around or just enjoy not having to be a slave to your dough – sourdough baking timelines and some careful planning make sure that you can enjoy sourdough on your terms.
While it’s true, sourdough baking can be a lengthy process, it can also be manipulated so that you can work the process around your life.
Things like feeding ratios, starter amounts, temperature controls and your fridge will become crucial elements to allowing this to happen.
If you’d like more information about creating your own baking timeline or making sourdough fit in with your own lifestyle, you’ll find lots of information in my book – Scheduling Sourdough: A Guide To Creating Baking Timelines.
Creating a Sourdough Baking Schedule
It’s a great idea to prepare a sourdough baking schedule before you start to bake your sourdough bread.
While you may not be able to adhere to it minute by minute, it will ensure you have a good idea of what needs to happen and when and you won’t skip a crucial step.
You need to think about the times that you are home and able to commit to the steps of a sourdough bread recipe – and the times that you’re not available and need to be hands off.
There’s no point mixing dough when you’re about to head off to work!
You’ll find 10 easy to follow baking timelines in my e-book Scheduling Sourdough.
From a sourdough schedule for working full time or caring for young children – you’ll even find the instructions on how to bake a quality loaf of sourdough in just one day! Perfect if you have a day off or would like to bake start to finish on a Saturday.
Example of a Weekday Sourdough Schedule
Here is an example of a baking timeline that you could use to fit sourdough into your life (it’s the one I use to bake sourdough for my busy family).
It’s based on my Simple Sourdough Bread recipe.
DAY 1
1.00pm – Feed sourdough starter
5.00 pm – Premix and Autolyse (while I cook dinner)
6.30pm – Form into a smooth ball. Rest for 30 minutes.
7.00pm – Perform 4-6 sets of stretch & folds over next 2 hours.
9.00pm – Cover and leave on bench overnight for bulk ferment if temp right.
DAY 2
6.00am – Shape & lift into banneton/bowl & into the fridge.
(I could bake my bread from around 2pm today if I wanted to, I just prefer a longer cold ferment).
DAY 3
2.00pm – 32 hours later place into hot oven.
7.00pm – finally cut into delicious sourdough!
Looking for simple ways to use your sourdough discard? You’ll find 17+ interesting uses for sourdough discard here.
