Wild Loaf Lab
Choose a recipe, tell us when you want to bake, and we’ll turn it into a simple bread-day plan. This planner can only give rough estimates, so keep loaf notes to learn the personality of your starter and your kitchen environment, then adjust times up or down as you learn.
Start from now, or plan backward from a target oven time.
That tells us whether your first step is feeding or mixing.
Use this if your starter has been refrigerated and fed within the last month. The ratio changes the planning estimate, but it isn’t a crucial detail—choose the feeding style you prefer. Timings are rough estimates assuming an ambient temperature around 74°F.
Each loaf starts with 500g flour. We’ll scale everything else.
Choose the range that best matches the dough after mixing, or your room temperature if you do not measure it.
Dough recipe
Flour is the 100% baseline. The other sliders are baker’s percentages.
Bread day
A little more from the Lab
Useful bread notes, sent infrequently. We never sell your email.
Prologue
Making sourdough is simple, even if the abundance of information around it can make it sound complicated. Ultimately: mix the ingredients using a scale, stretch and fold at least once, wait until the dough is bubbly and domed, put it in the fridge for a while, then bake it.
Each step is forgiving. A calculator can make the process look more exact than it really is. The first step of learning to bake is making your first Lousy Loaf so you can feel and see what each stage is like. Your second loaf will already feel much more intuitive.
If you’re embarking on your first loaf, we recommend checking out our recipe walk through.
Your ancestors are rooting for you.
Flour is always the 100% baseline. If you have 100g flour, a recipe at 70% hydration uses 70g water. That same relationship makes a recipe easy to scale up or down.
Flour, starter culture, dough temperature, room conditions and other variables can move fermentation more than any calculator can predict. During bulk fermentation, use the estimated time as your cue to start inspecting the dough, then rely on the five signs of readiness.
This clock helps you plan and the dough tells you when it’s ready.
The loaf, step by step
Sourdough is a sequence of small jobs: wake the culture, build strength, let fermentation create gas and flavor, shape it, artsy it up, bake it, love it.
Your starter is the living culture that leavens the bread. Yeast produces gas; lactic-acid bacteria contribute acidity and flavor. A starter kept in the refrigerator is simply moving slowly, so a feed brings it back to a strong, active state before you ask it to raise a loaf.
Ready starter is visibly risen, aerated and near peak activity.
A levain is a small offshoot of your starter built specifically for one batch of dough. Its biggest advantage here is for making large batches and control over hydration: a mother starter may be thick, loose, or inconsistently fed, while a levain lets you deliberately choose how much starter, flour, and water enter the dough.
It is optional. Use it when you want the inoculation going into the dough to be more precisely defined.
Mixing hydrates the flour and distributes the starter and salt. As the flour absorbs water, gluten begins forming a stretchy network. A few folds during early fermentation organize and strengthen that network so it can hold the gas your starter produces without requiring aggressive kneading.
Bulk fermentation is the main fermentation period after starter or levain enters the dough and before shaping. The dough becomes lighter, more elastic and visibly larger as fermentation produces gas and the gluten network traps it.
Temperature changes the pace dramatically, so the clock is only an estimate of when to start inspecting.
Shaping gathers the fermented dough into an organized loaf and creates tension across its surface. That tension gives the expanding dough direction in the oven and helps it hold height rather than spreading outward.
Scoring gives the expanding loaf a deliberate place to open. It relieves surface stress as the loaf rises, can improve oven spring, and gives you a chance to make the finished loaf look gorgeous.
Handle the dough deliberately, but avoid pressing out all the gas you worked to build.
Cold proofing puts the shaped loaf in the refrigerator. Fermentation slows considerably, the dough firms up and becomes easier to score, and the long rest gives you scheduling flexibility while continuing to develop flavor. Twelve hours is a useful everyday starting point; extending the rest toward a few days generally makes the loaf more sour and can gradually reduce oven spring.
Warm proofing keeps the loaf at room temperature for a faster, same-day finish. It is more sensitive to room temperature and dough condition, so the dough itself matters more than a fixed timer.
The first part of the bake is the last burst of expansion: trapped gases expand, water turns to steam and the loaf rises until the crust begins to set. A thoroughly preheated oven gives that oven spring the best chance to happen quickly before the structure firms.
40 minutes at 450°F is a useful starting point, though many good recipes use different temperatures and timings. A cloche/dutch oven traps moisture around the loaf, keeping the crust soft for longer so the dough can expand before the surface sets.
You can keep the lid on for the full bake for a softer, blonder loaf. For a darker, thicker and crisper crust, remove the lid for roughly the final 15 minutes so dry heat can deepen browning and develop the roasted flavors associated with the Maillard reaction.