A Sourdough Schedule for People With Jobs

Sourdough schedules assume a day at home. The fix is the refrigerator: a shaped loaf will hold in a cold retard for twelve to eighteen hours, and it bakes better for it. Flavour improves, the crumb sets more reliably, and the whole thing fits either side of a working day.

The timetable

19:00, day one — feed the starter 1:1:1. Ten minutes.
07:30, day two — mix 500 g flour, 350 g water, 100 g starter, 10 g salt. Rest 40 minutes, then one set of folds. Leave covered, cool room.
18:30 — shape, into a banneton, straight into the fridge. Fifteen minutes.
07:00, day three — oven to 250°C with the pot inside, bake 20 minutes lidded, 22 minutes uncovered. Bread before work.

Cold-retarded dough turned out of the banneton: slack at the edge, domed in the middle, holding its own shape.

Baker's percentages, and the one that matters

Hydration	Handling	Crumb
65%	Easy, forgiving	Tight, sandwich-style
70%	The useful default	Open but even
78%	Sticky, needs a bench scraper	Very open, fragile
85%	Only with strong flour	Holes, and a flat base

Start at 70% and change nothing else for four bakes. Almost every 'my starter is weak' message we receive is a hydration or a temperature problem, not a starter problem — a kitchen at 17°C roughly doubles every fermentation time in every recipe you will read.

Ferment by the look of the dough, not the clock. The clock does not know how cold your kitchen is.

Judging the bulk

Take a small sample of the mixed dough in a straight-sided jar and mark the level; when it has risen 60–75% the bulk is done, whatever the recipe said in hours. The loaf itself is unreliable to read because the surface dries. Underproved dough tears when shaped and bakes dense at the base; overproved dough spreads on the peel and will not hold a score.