Cooling

Cooling is still part of the bread. Heat has set starch and crust in the Baking the loaf; now Water as steam keeps moving out, and the Crumb finishes going from gel to something you can slice. Calvel includes this after-bake settling in technical breadmaking rather than treating the loaf as finished at the oven door ¹.

Use the loaf as the measure: a crust that has regained its crackle and a crumb that cuts cleanly tell you more than a fixed cooling timer. If the knife smears the center, the useful question is whether the loaf was underbaked or underfermented, not whether it missed an arbitrary number of minutes ¹.

There is no sourced minute count in the works cited here. Time is a proxy. The loaf should feel lighter as vapor leaves, the crust should crackle rather than stay leather-soft from trapped steam, and the crumb should not smear on the knife. Cutting while the interior is still a hot gel tears it into gum.

What to notice #

King Arthur's over-hot dough trial is a cooling diagnostic: a loaf that had bubbled and sagged in the pan wrinkled further as it cooled, with a gap under the top crust ². That wrinkling is structure that was already spent, announcing itself as the loaf shrinks. A well-sprung loaf (Oven spring) loses volume more honestly: it settles, it does not collapse.

Cool on a rack so the bottom Crust can dry. A loaf left in a pan or wrapped while hot steams its own crust soft. Gummy crumb after a full cool is usually underbake or underfermentation, not a missing rest ritual — the teaching note on Country loaf (teaching formula) makes the same point. After the loaf has cooled, keeping quality is Staling, not a food-safety clock. Do not invent a "safe cooling temperature" for bread; this is quality, not canning.