Bread Timeline Planner

Bread is a schedule with one fixed point at the end. The part hand-planning skips is that the steps depend on the temperature of the room: dough at 26°C ferments roughly twice as fast as dough at 18°C, so a recipe's four hours of bulk is four hours in the kitchen it was written in and six in a cold one.

What you are making

Out of the oven at

The one fixed point; everything else counts back from it.

Kitchen temperature in °C

Times are quoted at 22°C and scaled from there.

How many loaves

A second loaf adds oven time, not proving time.

Start at 01:55 to have sourdough out of the oven at 17:00 — that is 15h 5m in all, with fermentation scaled by 1× for a 22°C kitchen.

At	Step	Takes	Note
01:55	Feed the starter ·scaled	6h 0m	until it doubles and domes
07:55	Autolyse	45m	flour and water only, no salt yet
08:40	Mix and add salt	15m	bring it together
08:55	Bulk ferment ·scaled	5h 0m	with a fold every 45 minutes for the first three
13:55	Shape	20m	pre-shape, rest, final shape
14:15	Final prove ·scaled	2h 0m	until it springs back slowly
16:15	Bake	45m	covered for 20 minutes, then uncovered
17:00	Out of the oven

✓ Each step starts where the one before it finished — 7 steps with no gap and no overlap
✓ The steps add up to the whole day — 15h 5m from first thing to out of the oven
✓ The bake finishes exactly when you asked — the last step ends on 17:00, so everything before it is counted back from there
✓ The room is at the reference temperature — 22°C against a reference of 22°C gives a factor of 1 — fermentation roughly doubles every 8 degrees
✓ Only what ferments in the room moves with the temperature — 3 of 7 steps scale — mixing, shaping, baking and anything in the fridge take the same time in any kitchen

Dough does not read clocks. Watch the dough rather than the schedule, and treat these as the times to check it.

What this generator does

Scales each fermentation step by the room temperature, lays every step out backwards from the moment the bread comes out, and gives a clock time for each.

How to use this tool

Choose what you are making and when you want it out of the oven.
Put in your kitchen temperature — a thermometer beats a guess.
Read the timeline, earliest step first.
Watch the dough rather than the clock; these are the times to go and look.

Understanding the controls

What you are making: Sourdough with a starter feed, a straightforward yeasted loaf, focaccia, or a dough given an overnight prove in the fridge. Each has its own steps and its own fixed times.
Out of the oven at: The one thing that is fixed. Everything else is counted backwards from it, including the starter feed the night before.
Kitchen temperature: Where the dough will actually sit, which is often not where the thermostat is. The quoted times assume 22°C and are scaled from there.
How many loaves: More loaves take longer in the oven but not longer to prove, so only the bake is lengthened.

Common use cases

Working out what time to feed a starter for bread on Saturday morning
Adjusting a recipe's timings for a cold kitchen in January
Planning an overnight fridge prove around when you get up
Seeing how much later you can start on a warm day
Timing focaccia to come out just before people arrive

How this generator works

Fermentation roughly doubles in speed for every eight degrees, so the scale factor is two to the power of the difference from the reference temperature over eight — halving the proving in a warm kitchen and doubling it in a cold one. Handling steps do not scale: mixing, shaping and baking take the same time in any kitchen, and neither does a cold prove, because the fridge sets its own temperature. The timeline is laid out backwards from the bake and then walked forwards to check it: each step must start exactly where the one before it finished, the steps must add up to the whole, and the last must land on the time you asked for.

Randomness and fairness

Nothing is random. The same loaf in the same kitchen always gives the same timeline.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

Dough does not read clocks: watch it, and treat these times as when to go and look.
Starter strength, hydration and flour all change fermentation as much as temperature does.
The doubling-every-eight-degrees rule is a baker's rule of thumb rather than a law of chemistry.
Oven times are for a domestic oven and a single tin or dutch oven.

Privacy and your data

The timeline is worked out in your browser. No times or temperatures are transmitted or stored.