How to Use the Bake Planner
Create a recipe, generate a schedule, track the bake, and document results
Sourdough and Bread is a bake planner, not only a calculator. You choose bread style and leavening, dial in weight and hydration with baker’s percentages, get a clock-time bake schedule, run an active bake with optional reminders, and save notes and photos to My Loaf. This guide walks through each part.
1. Choose Your Bread Style
In Guided or Pro you will see three options: Super Soft (Tangzhong), Classic Sandwich, and Artisan / Rustic. Super Soft uses the Japanese tangzhong method for very soft bread. Classic Sandwich is for everyday loaves. Artisan is a lean, crusty loaf with higher hydration. The style changes default hydration, sweetener, and fat, and whether tangzhong appears in the recipe.
On Guided Step 1, the Current Selection card shows a fixed formula baseline for the style you picked—typical hydration and whole-wheat ranges (e.g. 65–72% hydration and 0–15% whole wheat for tangzhong; 60–70% and 15–35% for sandwich; 72–90% and 10–30% for artisan). Those numbers are starting guidance only; your actual recipe comes from the sliders in later steps.
2. Set Leavening: Sourdough or Yeast
Choose Sourdough or Yeast. For Sourdough, pick Leaven Style: Liquid, Stiff, or Sweet stiff starter. For Yeast, you can use a pre-ferment such as Poolish or Biga. The planner shows the build and main dough with weights calculated. Rise time is estimated from room temperature and inoculation (starter or pre-ferment percentage).
3. Adjust the Sliders (or Guided Steps)
Guided is a six-step workflow: style → leaven & timing → batch size (with ferment window and alternative-flour hints) → crumb goal → fine-tune → bake plan. Step 4 shows texture presets for the bread style you picked in Step 1, so you are choosing a crumb variant rather than re-picking the bread type. Pro splits the screen: presets and choices on the left; Recipe details sliders and live ingredient weights on the right. On desktop Pro you can turn on Pin while scrolling to keep sliders visible while you read the recipe below.
Room Temp affects estimated rise time. Weight is total dough size in grams. Whole Wheat is the share of flour that is whole grain. Ferment window presets map to starter / pre-ferment %. Hydration, sweetener, and fat update the formula in real time.
4. Read the Recipe and Bake Schedule
You get ingredient weights by stage (starter, tangzhong if any, main dough) plus a clock-time bake schedule on Guided step 6. Use Copy Recipe to share the formula. Use Start baking to enter active bake mode: mark stages done, enable browser reminders when a step runs past its estimate, and keep going until the loaf is finished.
5. FAQ and My Loaf
Both Guided and Pro include a Bake planner FAQ (expand each question for answers about reminders, the journal, yeast vs sourdough, and more). On Pro it sits after the Process Guide; on Guided it appears below your step navigation.
Save the bake with notes, ratings, and photos in My Loaf. Preferences and history stay in your browser (localStorage)—export/import if you want a backup. No account is required. More detail on starter care, tangzhong, and hydration is in our guides. Happy baking.