Baking Your First Loaf

Preheat everything

Place your Dutch oven (with the lid on) in the oven and preheat to 500°F for at least 45–60 minutes. The Dutch oven needs to be fully saturated with heat — a short preheat produces a pale, under-risen loaf.

Don't skip this. The initial burst of steam trapped under the lid is what gives sourdough its oven spring and blistered crust.

Score and load

Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit your Dutch oven. Turn the cold dough out onto the parchment — the seam side is now down, the smooth side up.

Score immediately with a sharp blade (a razor blade or lame) at a 45° angle, about ½ inch deep. One confident slash is enough. The score controls where the loaf opens in the oven — without it, the crust will crack randomly.

Lift the parchment and dough into the hot Dutch oven. Put the lid on.

Bake

Covered: 20 minutes at 500°F. The steam trapped inside creates the crust and allows the loaf to expand fully.

Uncovered: Remove the lid, reduce to 450°F, bake 20–25 minutes until the crust is deep brown — darker than you think. Pale bread is undercooked bread. The Maillard reaction that creates flavor happens in the last 10 minutes of color development.

Cool before cutting

This is the hardest part. The interior of the loaf is still cooking as it cools — the crumb is setting, steam is escaping, the structure is firming up. Cut too early and the crumb will be gummy and dense even if the fermentation was perfect.

Wait at least 1 hour. 2 hours is better. The loaf will still be warm.

Read the crumb

Cut the loaf in half and look at the crumb. This is your feedback.

Open, irregular holes of different sizes: good fermentation, good shaping. Tight, uniform, small bubbles: underfermented — give it more time next bake. Large holes near the top, dense at the bottom: overproofed. Gummy texture: cut too early, or underfermented.

Write down what you see, what temperature your kitchen was, and how long bulk took. Your second loaf will be better because you'll know what to adjust.

What comes next

You now have a working starter and a baked loaf. The starter will keep indefinitely in the fridge — feed it once a week to maintain it. Take it out the night before you want to bake, feed it, and use it when it peaks.

The rest of this course goes deeper into each part of the process: fermentation science, temperature control, shaping technique, and the mental models that make every bake more predictable. But you've already done the hard part. You made bread from flour, water, and salt. That's the whole thing.