Overproofing, and why sea-level recipes lie to us
A bit of a confession, this one, because I did it to myself for weeks and didn't figure out why.
The setup. Most sourdough recipes — online, in books, wherever — get written by someone at or near sea level. Makes sense, that's where most people live. They'll tell you bulk ferment for 4 to 6 hours, or shape and let it proof for 2 hours, whatever it is. Specific numbers. Feels trustworthy.
Except we're not at sea level. American Fork sits around 4,600 feet, and at that elevation things move faster. Less atmospheric pressure, dough rises quicker, gas bubbles expand faster. Your starter's more active too, generally. So when a recipe says "let it rise 4 hours" and you follow that like it's scripture, you can end up well past where you want to be. That's overproofing.
What overproofed dough actually looks like
You'll want to be able to spot this, not just hear about it.
- The dough looks puffy but kind of tired. Not domed and lively, more slumped.
- When you poke it, the indent doesn't spring back at all. It just... stays. Or worse, it slowly deflates around your finger.
- It feels loose and slack instead of having any structure to it.
- If you try to shape it, it tears instead of holding a shape. Just kind of falls apart in your hands.
- Baked, it comes out flat, dense in a gummy way (different from underproofed dense, which is more tight and closed), and sometimes with big weird holes right under the crust and nothing else going on inside.
Disappointing bread. Not inedible, your family will still eat it, but not what you were going for.
Why the clock lies to you here
Let me be straight, because this is the opinion I'll actually push on you: watch the dough, not the clock. I've said some version of that before in this course and I'm going to keep saying it, because up here it matters double. A recipe's timing is a guess written for somebody else's kitchen. Your kitchen, your flour, your starter, your elevation, all different. The clock is a starting guideline, not a finish line.
So instead of "bulk ferment for 5 hours," you're looking for: has the dough grown by somewhere around 50 to 75%? Does it look bubbly on the surface and along the sides of the bowl? Does it feel airy and a little jiggly when you nudge the bowl, instead of dense? That's your signal, not the timer on your phone.
In summer especially, up here, I've had bulk fermentation finish in 3 hours when a recipe told me to expect 5 or 6. Had I walked away and trusted the clock, I'd have had soup.
A quick story on getting fooled the other direction
It's not always overproofing that trips people up; sometimes it's the opposite problem tricking you into overcorrecting. I went through a whole stretch, probably a month, where my dough was sluggish and slow no matter what I did. I kept thinking it was close to peak, giving it more time because it looked underdeveloped, and it turned out the actual issue was my water. Our tap water runs cold up here, and I was mixing my dough with water straight out of the tap without thinking about it. Cold water slows fermentation down a lot. So I was compensating by giving it more and more time, and some days that pushed me right into overproofed territory, because once I warmed the water up out of habit one day, the dough took off faster than I expected and I wasn't watching close enough.
The fix was simple once I found it. I started warming my water to around 90-95 degrees before mixing, and everything got more consistent and predictable. But the lesson under the lesson: your assumptions about why your dough is behaving a certain way can be wrong, and the clock won't tell you that. Only watching the dough will.
What to do if you catch it
If you catch dough that's gone past peak during bulk fermentation, you've got options. You can still shape it and bake it, it just won't be your best loaf. Handle it gently, don't try to build more tension than it has left to give. Bake it a little cooler and a little longer if you can, since overproofed dough can brown fast on the outside before the inside's done.
If it's shaped and proofing and you catch it overproofed before the oven, into the fridge it goes — cold slows everything down and can buy you a little rescue time, though it won't fully undo it.
Either way, it's not a disaster. You eat the bread, you learn the dough, you try again next week. That's the whole deal with this hobby.
Before next time
Next time you mix a dough, ignore the clock on the recipe entirely for one batch and just go by what the dough looks like. Write down what time it actually hit peak for you, and how many hours that was. That's your real number for your kitchen, not somebody else's.
- J