A sourdough proofing schedule lives or dies on temperature, which is exactly why a plan built for packaged yeast falls apart the moment you switch to a live starter. This scheduler is made for the real rhythm of sourdough: feeding the starter, building a levain, running a bulk fermentation that stretches or shrinks with the warmth of your dough, shaping, and then the long overnight rest in the fridge. You set your dough temperature and the time you want to bake, and the tool spaces out each stage so the loaf is ready when you are, whether that is late tonight or first thing tomorrow.
Sourdough rewards patience, but patience without a plan usually means a dough that over-proofs on the counter while you sleep, or a levain that peaks and falls before you get to it. Because wild yeast and bacteria work at a pace set by heat and time, the same recipe can take four hours or ten depending on your kitchen. A good sourdough proofing schedule turns that variability from a source of stress into something you can steer.
What this sourdough proofing scheduler does
The tool builds a start to finish plan around two things you control: your dough temperature and your target bake time. From those it lays out the whole sequence, building the levain, mixing and any autolyse rest, the bulk fermentation with its stretch and folds, shaping, and the final proof, which is often the overnight cold retard in the fridge.
Because temperature drives everything, the scheduler leans on it. Drag the dial to 78F and the plan shortens the bulk ferment. Drag it down to a cool 68F and that same stage stretches out. You can watch the change happen: the stage bar is drawn to scale, so the bulk block visibly swells or shrinks against the blocks either side of it, and the curve underneath plots bulk hours against dough temperature across the whole usable range with a marker that slides as you drag. Instead of holding a chart in one hand and a clock in the other, you get a single, clear sourdough proofing schedule you can follow through the day and overnight.
Under the bar the plan becomes a list of timed checkpoints: feed the levain, mix, fold, end bulk, shape, refrigerate, preheat, bake. Each one carries a real clock time and a short note about what you are actually looking for at that moment. It is the part you keep open on your phone at the counter.
Who this tool is for
New sourdough bakers benefit most. The learning curve is less about technique and more about timing, about knowing when the levain is ready, when to end the bulk, and how the fridge fits in. A schedule that spells out each stage with times attached shortens that curve and prevents the classic beginner mistakes of under and over proofing.
People with jobs and full days are the other core group. Two of the most common searches around sourdough are schedules for a nine to five and schedules for people who work, which tells you how many bakers are trying to fit a slow ferment around a busy life. The overnight fridge retard is the key that makes it possible, and this tool is built to plan exactly that. Switch the direction control to work forward from a feeding and you can check, before you commit, whether the loaf really will be ready before you leave the house.
Experienced bakers use it to adapt to the seasons. A schedule that works in a warm July kitchen is wrong by hours in a cold January one. Being able to plug in a dough temperature and get an adjusted plan saves a lot of over-proofed winter loaves and rushed summer ones.
Why sourdough timing is different from yeasted bread
If you have baked with packaged yeast, sourdough will feel familiar and foreign at once. The stages have similar names, but the clock behaves differently. Commercial yeast is a concentrated, predictable dose, so a straight yeasted loaf rises on a fairly reliable timetable of a couple of hours. Sourdough leavens with a wild culture of yeast and bacteria that is far more sensitive to temperature and needs much longer to do its work.
That sensitivity is the whole story. A sourdough bulk fermentation might take four hours in a warm kitchen and ten in a cold one, from the very same recipe. The culture also acidifies the dough as it ferments, which builds the tangy flavor but weakens the gluten over time, so ending each stage at the right moment matters more than it does with yeast. And because the process is long, sourdough almost always uses the fridge as a scheduling tool, slowing the dough overnight so the bake fits your life.
For everyday yeasted breads, dinner rolls, sandwich loaves, a quick boule, a different planner suits better. Our bread bake timeline scheduler works backward from your target time through the mix, rises, and bake on that faster, fixed clock. This page stays focused on the slower, temperature led world of a live starter.
The stages, from starter to bake
A sourdough loaf moves through more stages than a yeasted one, and each has its own timing. Knowing them makes the schedule make sense, and they are the six blocks you see in the stage bar.
- Feeding the starter and building a levain. You take a spoonful of ripe starter and feed it fresh flour and water, then wait for it to grow. The levain is ready near its peak, when it has roughly doubled, domed on top, and turned bubbly, which can take about 4 to 12 hours depending on the feeding ratio and warmth. Many bakers confirm with a float test.
- Mixing and autolyse. You combine flour and water, often resting them together for 30 minutes to a few hours before adding the levain and salt. This rest hydrates the flour and makes the dough easier to develop. The scheduler adds a quarter of an hour on top for the mixing itself.
- Bulk fermentation. The long, important rise, done while the dough is still one mass and driven by dough temperature. Bakers give it a series of stretch and folds early on to build strength. This is where most of the flavor and structure form.
- Shaping and a short bench rest. Pre-shape, let the dough relax, then form it into its final round or oval and settle it into a floured banneton.
- The final proof. In most schedules this is the cold overnight retard in the fridge. On a same day plan it happens on the counter instead, and it is much shorter.
- The bake. Usually in a screaming hot Dutch oven, lid on then lid off, straight from the fridge.
How dough temperature drives the schedule
Here is the single most useful idea in sourdough: track the dough temperature, not just the air. A warm bowl of dough on a cool counter, or a cool dough in a warm room, both ferment at the speed of the dough itself. A cheap probe thermometer pushed into the dough is worth its weight in flour.
The numbers make the point. As a working guide drawn from common baker charts, bulk fermentation runs roughly like this by dough temperature. Near 68 to 70F, expect about 7 to 10 hours. Near 72 to 75F, about 5 to 7 hours. Near 76 to 80F, about 4 to 6 hours. Near 81 to 85F, about 3 to 4.5 hours. The final proof at room temperature follows the same pattern, shorter when warm and longer when cool, often 1.5 to 3 hours in the 74 to 80F range if you are not using the fridge.
Rather than a lookup table with hard edges, the scheduler draws one smooth curve through those figures. It is anchored at the most commonly quoted number, five hours of bulk at 78F dough, and it halves or doubles from there every twelve and a half degrees Fahrenheit. That reproduces the published ranges closely while giving you a sensible answer at 73F or 81F, temperatures no chart bothers to print. The shaded band around the curve is the honest spread, roughly plus or minus twenty percent, because flour, hydration, and starter strength all move the finish line.
The lesson from these ranges is to treat any printed time as a starting estimate and let the dough confirm it. Warmer is faster, cooler is slower, and a few degrees moves the finish line by a lot. This is why a smart sourdough proofing schedule asks for your dough temperature before it gives you times. Aim for the comfortable middle, often cited as 74 to 76F and drawn as the shaded column on the chart, if you want the most predictable and forgiving results.
The overnight fridge, or cold retard, schedule
The cold retard is the move that makes sourdough fit a normal life, and it is worth understanding on its own. After the bulk ferment and shaping, you place the loaf, usually nestled in a floured banneton or a bowl lined with a cloth, into the refrigerator. At a typical home fridge temperature near 38 to 40F, the yeast and bacteria slow dramatically, so the dough proofs very gently over many hours.
A cold retard usually runs 8 to 16 hours, which lines up perfectly with a night's sleep, and many doughs hold well up to about 24 to 36 hours if your plans shift. The long, cold ferment does three helpful things. It develops a deeper, more complex, tangier flavor. It firms the dough so it holds its shape and scores with a clean, sharp line. And it decouples your bake time from your bulk ferment, so you can shape after dinner and bake before breakfast.
In the tool, the retard is the hatched block in the stage bar, drawn as a pause rather than an active ferment, and its length is yours to set anywhere from 8 to 36 hours. Because it usually dominates the plan, it is also the easiest lever to pull when the schedule lands at an awkward hour. Nudge the fridge time by two hours and everything upstream of it moves with you.
A classic overnight sourdough proofing schedule looks like this. In the morning, feed your starter or build a levain. By late morning or midday, when the levain peaks, mix the dough. Bulk ferment through the afternoon, timed by dough temperature, with folds in the first couple of hours. In the early evening, shape the loaf and settle it into the banneton. Refrigerate overnight for that 8 to 16 hour retard. The next morning, preheat the oven and the Dutch oven, then bake the cold dough straight from the fridge. For people who work, the same idea shifts later: build the levain before you leave, mix and bulk ferment in the evening, shape before bed, retard overnight, and bake the following evening or morning.
How to use the ToolFiddle sourdough proofing scheduler
The tool is built to be quick and to respect how sourdough actually behaves. Here is the process.
- Pick your direction and your anchor time. Most bakers work backward, so leave it on the bake time and enter when you want the loaf to go into the oven. If your starter is already fed, switch to working forward from a feeding instead and the plan runs the other way. Switching direction keeps the plan you are looking at and simply re-anchors it to the other end.
- Set your dough temperature. This is the most important input, so measure it with a probe if you can. Drag the dial and watch the bulk block in the stage bar stretch or squeeze in real time, with the marker sliding along the curve underneath. The chip beside the number tells you whether you are in the cold, the sweet spot, or the fast end of the range.
- Choose how the loaf finishes. Overnight in the fridge is the default and the reason most people are here. Set the number of hours you want it to retard. Switch to a same day warm proof and the final proof is sized from the same temperature curve instead, so the whole bake fits inside a single day.
- Match the levain and the autolyse to your recipe. Pick the feeding ratio you actually use, from a fast 1:1:1 to a slow, forgiving 1:5:5, and the plan adjusts how early you need to feed. Set the autolyse rest to whatever your recipe calls for, or to zero for a straight mix.
- Read and follow your schedule. The checkpoints appear as an ordered list of timed steps: feed, mix, fold, end bulk, shape, refrigerate, preheat, bake, out of the oven. Keep it open at the counter and move through them, using the poke test and the look of the dough to confirm the big transitions rather than trusting the clock blindly. The copy button puts the whole plan on your clipboard as plain text if you would rather paste it into a note.
Everything you enter stays on your device, which we cover in more detail below.
A worked overnight schedule
Concrete times make the plan click, so here is a full overnight example for a loaf you want to bake at 8 a.m. tomorrow, with dough fermenting near 76 to 78F.
Start the day before. At 8 a.m., build the levain from ripe starter and give it until it peaks. Around noon, with the levain domed and passing the float test, mix the dough and rest it. Bulk fermentation runs from about 12:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., roughly five hours at that temperature, with stretch and folds in the first two hours. At 5:30 the dough has risen and feels airy, so shape it and let it bench rest briefly. By 6 p.m., settle the shaped loaf into a floured banneton and place it in the fridge. It cold retards overnight, about 14 hours, which is right in the forgiving window. The next morning, start preheating the oven and Dutch oven around 7:15 a.m. so both are blazing by 8, then bake the cold loaf straight from the fridge.
If your kitchen ran cooler, say 70F, the same plan would stretch the bulk ferment to seven or eight hours, so you would mix earlier or accept a later shaping. That single change is why the scheduler asks for temperature first, and it is the change you can watch happen by dragging the dial from 78 down to 70 and seeing the bulk block swallow the afternoon.
A worked same day warm schedule
Not every bake needs the fridge. Here is a same day sourdough proofing schedule for a loaf you want to bake in the evening, with dough near 78 to 80F.
Feed the starter early, around 7 a.m., aiming for a levain that peaks by late morning. At about 11 a.m., mix the dough. Bulk fermentation runs from roughly 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., about four and a half hours at that warmth, with folds early. At 4 p.m., shape the loaf and give it a short bench rest. The final proof happens at room temperature this time, about 1.5 to 2.5 hours, so from around 4:15 to 6:15 p.m. Use the poke test to confirm readiness. Preheat during that final proof so the oven is hot by 6:15, then bake. You get sourdough start to finish in a single day, with a slightly milder tang than the overnight version because there was no long cold ferment to build extra acidity.
The poke test and reading your dough
Times are guides, but the dough gives the real answer, and the poke test is how you ask it. Lightly flour a fingertip and gently press the surface of the proofed dough about half an inch deep, then watch how the dent behaves.
If the indentation springs back slowly and leaves a slight lasting mark, the dough is proofed and ready to bake. If it springs back quickly and fully, the dough is under-proofed and needs more time, so give it another twenty to thirty minutes and try again. If the dent stays put, the dough feels slack, or it seems to sigh and deflate, it is over-proofed. Bake it anyway, expect a flatter loaf, and shorten the stage next time. Those three readings are laid out side by side in the tool so you can glance at them with dough on your hands.
With an overnight cold retard, many bakers simply bake from the fridge on schedule and rely on the firmness of the cold dough, but the poke test is still the best way to learn what proper proofing feels like. Reading the dough goes beyond the poke, too. A well fermented dough feels alive and airy, shows some bubbles on the surface and along the sides of the container, and has grown in volume without turning to soup. Learning these signs is what eventually lets you loosen your grip on the clock, and a written sourdough proofing schedule is the scaffold that gets you there.
Feeding the starter and timing the levain
The schedule really begins with the starter, and getting the levain right sets up everything after it. A levain is simply an offshoot of your starter built specifically for a bake, fed a set ratio of flour and water and grown until it is at its most active.
The feeding ratio changes the timing, which is why it is one of the controls rather than a fixed assumption. A small amount of starter fed a large amount of flour, say a 1:5:5 ratio, takes longer to peak but gives you a wide, forgiving window, which is handy for overnight builds and for anyone feeding before work. A more even 1:1:1 feed peaks faster and falls faster, so it suits a bake you are standing over. Warmth speeds it up and cold slows it down, the same rule that governs the dough, so the scheduler moves the levain time with the temperature dial as well.
Use the levain at or just before its peak, when it has roughly doubled, domed on top, and is full of bubbles. Past the peak it begins to fall and loses some leavening power. The float test, dropping a small piece in water to see if it floats on trapped gas, is a quick sanity check, though it is not perfect. Timing the levain so it peaks right when you want to mix is one of the most satisfying parts of dialing in a sourdough proofing schedule.
Tips and common mistakes to avoid
- Measure dough temperature, do not guess it. This is the number that determines your times, and a five degree miss can throw off your whole plan. A small probe thermometer is the cheapest upgrade to your baking.
- End the bulk ferment on rise and feel, not on the clock alone. Ending too early gives a dense, tight loaf with little flavor, while going too long weakens the dough so it spreads and lacks spring. Aim for a healthy rise, often around 30 to 50 percent for many recipes, with an airy, bubbly feel.
- Do not let the levain fall before you use it. If life gets in the way and the levain peaks and collapses, it still has some strength but less, so your bulk ferment will run longer. Building a levain with a longer, more forgiving peak helps here.
- Respect the fridge window. A cold retard is forgiving, but it is not infinite. Somewhere past a day or so the dough slowly over-proofs, turning slack and very sour. If you need more time than the retard allows, bake and freeze rather than waiting.
- Bake cold and preheat hard. Sourdough loves a very hot start, so preheat the oven and your Dutch oven thoroughly, then bake the loaf straight from the fridge for the cleanest scoring and the best oven spring. The scheduler puts the preheat step 45 minutes before the bake for exactly this reason.
Your bake schedule stays on your device
Everything you enter into the scheduler stays with you. When you set your dough temperature, your bake time, and your stage lengths, that information is handled by code running inside your own browser and is never sent anywhere. There is no upload, nothing is stored, and nothing is logged on a server. Your plan for this weekend's loaves is simply not something we can see.
This on device design is intentional. Many free tools quietly ship what you type to a remote server, sometimes paired with tracking, just to do a calculation that could happen locally. Ours does the scheduling math on your machine, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to harvest. If you cut your internet connection right after the page loads, the sourdough proofing schedule keeps working, which is the plainest sign that your data never leaves your device.
Genuinely free, with no sign-up
This scheduler is free in the ordinary meaning of the word. There is no account to create, no email to hand over, and no payment at any point. You will not run into a wall asking you to register before it reveals your plan, and there is no premium tier quietly holding back the useful parts, because there are no held back parts.
We say this because gating simple tools has become a habit online. Some sites trade a plan you could rough out by hand for your email address or a subscription. A sourdough schedule should just be available. There are no usage limits either, so plan a single loaf or map out a month of weekend bakes, the tool behaves the same every time you open it.
Instant results with nothing in the way
Because the scheduling runs on your device, your plan appears the moment you enter your temperature and bake time. There is no spinner while a request travels to a server and back, no queue when the site is busy, and no sluggishness from the heavy advertising scripts that weigh down so many recipe pages. The page is deliberately lean, so it loads quickly even on an older phone and a patchy kitchen connection.
That speed matters more than it sounds. Sourdough already asks for your patience across many hours, so the planning part should be immediate. You open the tool, enter a couple of numbers, and get a full sourdough proofing schedule right away, then close it and get back to the dough. The tool does one job, does it fast, and stays out of your way.
Works on every device, even offline
The scheduler behaves the same on a phone leaning against the flour bin, a tablet by the mixer, or a laptop on the kitchen table. The layout adjusts to the screen so the temperature dial and the step list stay large and readable with messy hands. Once the page has loaded, the planning no longer needs the internet, so a dead zone in the kitchen or a flaky router will not interrupt an overnight bake. Nothing depends on a particular brand of browser, as long as it is a reasonably modern one, and there is nothing to download or install.
Related tools on ToolFiddle
Sourdough touches a few other small needs, and ToolFiddle keeps light, private tools for them. For everyday yeasted breads on a faster clock, the bread bake timeline scheduler plans mixing, rises, and bake by working backward from your target time. When you want an alarm for the end of a fold interval or a bake, the countdown timer counts down and alerts you, and the plain kitchen timer handles the twenty minutes with the lid on. To measure how long a stage really took in your kitchen, the stopwatch keeps a running clock. For switching a recipe between grams and ounces or Fahrenheit and Celsius, the unit converter does the conversion, and the percentage calculator is handy for hydration and baker percentages. Each keeps your information on your device, just like this one.
A quick recap
A sourdough proofing schedule is built around a live starter and the fact that temperature, not a fixed clock, sets the pace. Build a levain and use it near its peak, run a bulk fermentation sized to your dough temperature, roughly 4 to 6 hours near 78F and 7 to 10 hours near 68 to 70F, then shape and either proof warm for 1.5 to 3 hours or, more often, cold retard in the fridge for 8 to 16 hours overnight. Confirm readiness with the poke test, aim for a comfortable 74 to 76F for the most forgiving results, and bake the cold dough straight from the fridge into a very hot oven. The ToolFiddle scheduler turns all of that into a clear, timed plan, keeps it private on your device, and stays free with no sign-up, so your attention can go to the dough instead of the arithmetic.