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Baking the loaf

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The oven stage, when heat sets crust and crumb, gelatinizes starch, and turns a proofed dough into bread.

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Appears in Learn sourdough · Previous: Scoring · Next: Sourdough troubleshooting

Baking is not a single temperature. Steam, stone or steel, and oven spring in the first minutes decide the crust; dry heat afterward finishes the crumb.

The loaf that enters the oven is the sum of Fermentation and Dough development. Heat does not correct a dough that was never ready. Calvel’s technical writing treats the oven as the last of several linked operations 1.

A teaching formula for practicing this sequence is Country loaf (teaching formula). In San Francisco, Tartine Bakery is one public place where hearth bread is baked every day.

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Sources & further exploration

Cited in this article

  • The Taste of Bread — Raymond Calvel. Aspen Publishers. 2001. ISBN 978-0-8342-1646-4 — English edition of Calvel's technical account of French bread. The link is a WorldCat catalog record for the print edition; it is not a public full-text copy.

Updated 2026-08-25. gg:topic:bake · CC BY 4.0

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Gourmet Gastronomer. "Baking the loaf." Gourmet Gastronomer. Updated August 25, 2026. https://gourmetgastronomer.com/baking/sourdough/bake/.

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Gourmet Gastronomer. (2026, August 25). Baking the loaf. https://gourmetgastronomer.com/baking/sourdough/bake/

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