A scheduling tool for bread baking

I have been baking sourdough for 2+ years and I don't think people should take the timing too seriously. Yes it's good to loosely follow a schedule but if you don't the bread will still turn out fine. I don't think I've ever followed the exact same schedule twice. A few times I flat out forgot about the dough and shaped it hours after I was supposed to, and it still came out amazing. Sourdough is very forgiving. The most important thing in my opinion is mix it thoroughly in the beginning and to do the stretch and folds properly so the dough has strength and can hold it's shape for the later bulk rising.

Or you could also learn how to make mixed 4&#x2F;3 rye&#x2F;wheat sourdough with a natural starter, which requires no scheduling at all. Just mix it in the morning and put it in the oven some time in the late afternoon&#x2F;evening.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing it for years and it&#x27;s the only kind of bread that I can make on a regular basis. It&#x27;s something you can actually do daily, not an additional hobby.<p>Ingredients:<p>* 400g full-grain rye flour<p>* 300g wheat flour<p>* 10-15g salt<p>* 600ml water<p>* 50-80g levain starter (rye based)<p>mix, wait 6-8h, bake at 210C for 1h05.<p>This is a very popular kind of bread in Poland, while I found that in the US people don&#x27;t really know what to do with full-grain rye flour. I&#x27;ve read books that said it can only be used to make dark pumpernickel breads, and I never found the recipe above (or similar) in any bread-baking books I&#x27;ve read.<p>Also, the rye starter is fairly stable, forgiving and easy to maintain in a fridge.

Unlike the rest of the readers of HackerNews I&#x27;m not an expert on breadmaking. So, to me this looks like a very cool resource that could make me feel confident enough to try. It also looks real nice, and plays well on mobile! Nice work!

For those of us working in tech, it can be extremely satisfying to bake your own bread. I did that a few years ago, starting from scratch, making my own sourdough starter, and baking daily. It&#x27;s rediscovering what a typical family did centuries ago. Your starter becomes a pet. I had to stop it due to a lot of travel, but I still have a packet of my starter vacuum sealed and frozen. Maybe I should try again. Travel certainly won&#x27;t be an issue for a while.

I hope this works for somebody, but I&#x27;m going to have to critique the whole concept of &quot;timing&#x27; when baking sourdough bread.<p>After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else&#x27;s timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn&#x27;t enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn&#x27;t refreshed properly).<p>Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:<p>1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.<p>2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter<p>3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready<p>4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.<p>5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.<p>This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it&#x27;s robust and flexible enough for anything I&#x27;ve ever thrown at it.

I’m from Australia, and this site uses a weird imperial mix and metric measurements.<p>Weights are in grams, but temperature is in fahrenheit (I think, doesn’t actually say).<p>Please use one measurement system make it consistent, as well as switchable. Thanks.

I feel like that website is slightly counter-productive, because it puts a very strong emphasis on timing, whereas for producing high-quality bread, things like dough handling techniques, dough and oven humidity, or baking temperature have a much stronger effect than timing.

I have found that a minimal version of no-knead bread is already good:<p>700ml flour, 350ml water, 1 to 1.5 tsp salt, 1&#x2F;4 tsp instant yeast. Mix in bowl, cover, let stand for 12-16 hours. Put dutch oven in oven, heat to 250C. Take out the hot dutch oven, sprinkle some bran or flour or cornmeal on the bottom, scrape dough from the bowl into the dutch oven, sprinkle some bran on top. Bake 30min with lid, remove lid, bake 20min more.<p>I am sure extra steps (autolyse) and extra work (folding, shaping) would improve it, but even this minimal procedure makes tasty bread.

This may be the first recipe list I’ve ever seen that doesn’t include a 20 page essay on family history followed by half a dozen ads. I like the design

I&#x27;ve recently been making very low effort bread, which takes less then 10 minutes overall, and is (in my novice eyes) exactly the same as bread that has been kneaded with the &quot;proper&quot; schedule. Perhaps one of the experts here can shine a light on why something simple like below creates (almost) the same quality as a mixture that has been processed with much more effort?<p>- Put everything in a bowl, and mix it until it&#x27;s consistent. Usually takes 2-ish minutes. I find a simple, non-sharp knife to work best. - Cover it with cloth and let it sit for 12-20 hours depending on the mixture and temperature. - Get the mixture out, en cover with flower on all sides. Don&#x27;t knead or overly touch (it will lose volume). - Preheat the oven with an iron cast over pot, once it&#x27;s hot (250C), take out the pot, put in the mixture, and put on the lid. Halfway into the baking time, take off the lid.

Thanks for this. I&#x27;m extremely blessed to have a wife that enjoys making bread, and makes the best sourdough I&#x27;ve ever tasted. It&#x27;s mostly in her head but from the notes I&#x27;ve pieced together it seems close to the weekday sourdough. Bread is so easy to make and so delicious if you have patience, I really hope this leads to more people making bread. Store bought tastes like paper in comparison.<p>Protip to any future breadmakers: buy a cast iron Dutch oven. It&#x27;s the real game changer.

This is really cool, but to complete these recipes successfully on schedule you&#x27;d have to account for the ambient temperature of your house and adjust accordingly. A rise overnight at 65 degrees is going to take ~twice as long as one during the day at 75.

This is <i>amazing</i>! Great juice on the animations, the halving checkbox is a lovely touch.<p>You might want to proofread the recipe steps, check the temps update with metric&#x2F;imperial switches, and add a TLS redirect.

Are the amounts on the website broken or am I slightly dense? The &quot;Overnight Weekend Bread&quot; recipe (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.breadscheduler.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;recipe&#x2F;5bac85f720211052e0b703f1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.breadscheduler.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;recipe&#x2F;5bac85f720211052e0b70...</a>) instructs you to create 500g-550g of levain (the amounts in the overview and the step-by-step instructions don&#x27;t quite match for me). Then, in the &quot;Mix Dough&quot; step it tells you to use 108g of the levain. What happens to the rest? Are you supposed to throw it out or keep it as your sourdough starter?<p>Also, the &quot;Autolyse&quot; step tells you to use 402g of white flour while the overview specifies 804g. (Judging by the hydration they must certainly mean 402g).

At least personally, when my sourdough is ready (by appearance and feel) for the next step corresponds to the &quot;time&quot; from the &quot;recipe&quot; so infrequently that I&#x27;m shocked when it does<p>Following a schedule exactly is a great way to make Frisbees (short dense loaves)

This is cool. One minor thing, at least on Firefox it&#x27;s not possible to open the links to different breads in a new tab. It&#x27;d be nice to have that, just so the user can open the breads that interest them in tabs and then sort through them.

So funny how tech people must have such a detailed recipe for baking with sourdough. It&#x27;s the same with coffee.<p>Listen.<p>Dough is a living organism. You cannot set a timer to it. It must be nursed, especially based on what flour you use, freshness of the flour, the climate, the moisture etc.<p>If you want to be really good at baking, then bake at least 100 loafs and see what you learn.<p>Then try to change the flour brand and bake again. Then you will se a different result.<p>You cannot time food. Get it.

Anyone know a good recipe for a real French baguette? I haven’t yet been able to find a baguette in the Bay Area that tastes like they do in France (lived there for three years).<p>And honestly, good butter is hard to find too, although I did locate a little store in San Mateo that carries Echire.

Very well designed and implemented!<p>Would you mind adding a 12h&#x2F;24h switcher? I’m in the EU and I can’t figure out what 12am means vs. 12pm even though I keep looking it up.

Neat! I agree with the commenters above that we geeks try to take bread making (essentially, a free art form), and quantify it somehow and make it into and algorithm. And cheers to that!<p>Feature request: adjust timing automatically given a humidity + temperature measure.<p>Feature request 2: fetch ambient humidity and temperature automatically from users&#x27; GPS and time of day. ;-)

Great idea! Made my first sourdough bread yesterday after a couple of weeks of trying to get a starter going, the process is a fun and interesting project, especially while staying at home, and you don’t need much to get started (flour, water, ideally a cast iron pot, scales). Tastes amazing and reduces social contact of having to go to the shops&#x2F;bakery too :)

This is nice! I have been baking my own bread for a while now in a large masonry oven, it takes a while to learn when the temperature in the oven is right and the dough is good. Baking bread is more an art than science IMO. You learn it by doing it, this is a nice starting point.

Small bug report, I&#x27;m seeing &quot;Invalid date&quot; here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;rdcKJgw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;rdcKJgw</a><p>I just set the start time to &quot;right now&quot;. Safari Version 13.1 (15609.1.20.111.8)

Next step is to better schedule yeast procuring in stores around the world, I have been looking for it at stores close to me for two weeks now with no success, I&#x27;ve read that the situation is similar in other European cities.

Not sure if intentional but I really loved seeing Recipe.vue open and with comments and logs... I&#x27;m trying to learn how to generate charts with SVG and D3, this is helpful.

I discovered yesterday that loaf pan is mostly sold out in Target, Walmart. Guess people really have more time to do bakery due to the WFH.

It&#x27;s a good idea for a tool, but it could use a dough temperature and automatic schedule adjustment based on a modified temp.

I picked Sour Dough, changed start time to tomorrow morning, the diagram went blank and the schedule now shows Invalid Date.

This is super interesting.<p>I tried my first bake yesterday, and it... did not go well. Second try is currently forming. Fingers crossed.

This is great! What I miss though is some search or filtering of flour type. I only use spelt and rye.

Does someone has a plan to find T65-like flour in UK&#x2F;London? Everything looks sold out now.

Don&#x27;t buy sourdough bread from supermarkets, they don&#x27;t make it right. I heard that every time you buy one from them a hipster dies.

I love it!! Thanks for making!

Love it!!!

Few appreciate what has gone wrong with regular store bought bread. Regular store bought bread is created with the Chorleywood process, whereby substandard wheat and carbon dioxide can be mashed together to make some dough that can be baked into something that resembles bread.<p>These loaves of bread-style-wheat things are not made with just the basic ingredients needed for bread. There are the E numbers for preservatives and whatever else is &#x27;needed&#x27;. Often the additives are added to the flour rather than the dough and therefore do not have to be listed. Stuff derived from human hair can get in there as an &#x27;E number&#x27;. Often people self-diagnose themselves as having gluten or other allergies when there could be problems with the additives rather than the core product of what bread is supposed to be.<p>Chucking out store bought bread and joining the sourdough club is a popular reaction to the industrial nonsense that poses as &#x27;bread&#x27;. However, there are economic factors at play here. Sourdough keeps and it can be sold at a premium.<p>Actual fresh bread made with yeast and zero additives does not keep and cannot be sold at a premium. It is also less trendy and not on the radar of the hipster crowd. However, if one is sorting out one&#x27;s bread properly then a bread machine and the ingredients for bread making is a shrewd investment. It takes five minutes to load the machine with 500g of flour, 360 ml of water, 25g of some type of fat, a teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon and a half of sugar (to make the yeast do its thing) and a teaspoon and a quarter of salt. You can then press the start button to have the freshest bread you could wish for in four hours. Or you can set the timer so it is ready in the morning or when you are back from work.<p>By taking this approach you have the benefits of pure, fresh bread with none of the downsides of lengthy preparation times. You don&#x27;t need an app to manage your sourdough. It is also energy efficient as a bread machine is a small rather than large appliance. The Panasonic machines are best as you have recipes based on that machine plus you can get spare parts and the beginners manual uses metric rather than obscure &#x27;cup sizes&#x27;.<p>With home-machine, properly bakes bread you don&#x27;t need to be chewing on some sourdough rusk that is essentially stale, you can fire up the machine and keep the fresh loaves coming every 2-3 days. You can mix and match the flours to keep your bread varied. You can also focus on what you eat your bread with rather than try to forever by adding ingredients to the bread such as tomatoes, olives, nuts etc.<p>If you can maintain the routine then you never need join the sourdough club, you can cut your own way with the innovative &#x27;yeast&#x27; ingredient used properly rather than thrown out.

love the gantt charts