The cast iron pot went to my sister's for a fortnight, so I baked on a steel with a tray of water underneath instead. The first two loaves came out pale and a little flat, and I nearly gave up and waited for the pot to come back.
What was missing was steam, and not a small amount of it. A shallow tray with a cup of hot tap water evaporates long before the crust sets. What works: a heavy tray preheated together with the steel for a full hour, 300 ml of boiling water poured in the moment the loaf goes on, and then the door stays shut for twelve minutes. After that I pull the tray out, drop the oven from 250 °C to 230 °C and give it another twenty-five minutes.
The result is not identical. The crust comes out thinner and shatters rather than cracks, and the ear stays small unless I score deeper than usual — a good centimetre, at a flatter angle. The crumb, though, is the same as ever. The pot traps steam so well that it hides a lot of sloppy technique; without it I finally learned how much steam a loaf actually needs.
Why my rye keeps collapsing (and what finally fixed it)
For most of the summer every 70% rye I proofed in the kitchen came out of the oven with a dent in the middle. I blamed the starter, then the flour, then the weather. The real culprit was simpler: I was proofing by the clock and not by the dough. With the kitchen at 27 °C, ninety minutes was already too long. Cutting the final proof to fifty minutes and baking the moment the surface showed the first cracks gave me a loaf with an even crumb and no cave.
Two other small things helped: a heavier dusting of rye on the banneton, and letting the loaf rest a full day before slicing. Rye needs the time.
Heatwave dough: less starter, colder water
Three weeks of thirty-three degrees outside and twenty-nine in the kitchen, and every dough I mixed was ahead of me. By the time I got to shaping, the bulk was slack, over-risen and tearing instead of stretching. The recipe was not wrong; the room was.
Two changes fixed it. First, less starter: 60 g instead of my usual 100 g on 550 g of flour, which buys back the best part of an hour. Second, water straight from the fridge, around 6 °C. The old rule of tripling your target temperature and subtracting the flour, the room and the starter is no use in a kitchen this warm — it asks for water colder than ice. So I stopped aiming for 24 °C, accepted a dough that finished at 26 °C, and shortened everything else to match.
The rest is watching rather than timing. In that heat the bulk was done at three hours instead of five, and the shaped loaf went into the fridge to finish overnight. I have stopped setting alarms in August altogether.
A weekday loaf that doesn't need a schedule
Mix at nine in the evening, fold twice before bed, shape in the morning, bake after work. Same-day sourdough is a myth for people with jobs, but a 22-hour cold retard is not. This is the loaf I make most weeks now: 500 g bread flour, 50 g whole wheat, 385 g water, 100 g starter, 11 g salt.
Keeping a starter alive through a long trip
Three weeks away and I came back to a jar with a grey layer of liquid on top and a smell like nail polish remover. It looked dead. It wasn't. Two feedings at 1:5:5 with warm water and it was doubling again by the third day. Starters are far harder to kill than the internet suggests.
