Water temperature: our tap runs cold and it matters
Small lesson today. It's also the one that fixed a whole month of my life, so I won't apologize for how simple it is.
Water temperature. Nobody mentions it when you're starting out. Everyone's focused on the starter itself, the flour ratios, whether they're feeding right. Meanwhile the water going into the bowl is quietly running the whole show, and it gets no attention.
Our tap runs cold
Here's the thing about Utah County tap water — it's cold. Genuinely cold, not "room temperature, close enough." Especially coming through pipes in a house that sits at 4,600 feet in the winter. I didn't give it a thought for about a month. I used tap water straight from the faucet, because the recipe said "water" and I left it there.
My dough was sluggish. Rises took forever. The starter looked fine — bubbly, smelled right — but everything downstream of it was slow and I couldn't work out why. Same flour, same ratio, same jar. I kept assuming I'd botched the feeding.
It was cold water dragging everything down. Yeast is alive, and it moves at whatever speed the temperature allows. Cold water, slow yeast. Warmed the water and it was like flipping a switch. Same starter, same recipe, completely different dough.
What to actually do
Not complicated. You want your water somewhere around 80 to 90 degrees for most of what you're doing — feeding the starter, mixing dough. Warmer than tap, definitely, but not hot. Hot water kills yeast, or at least stresses it out badly, so don't overcorrect and start pulling near-scalding water from the hot tap. That's a real mistake people make the moment they hear "warm the water up." They go too far the other way.
No thermometer? My rough test: it should feel like warm bathwater on the inside of your wrist. Not hot. Comfortable. And if you've already got a kitchen scale — and you should, I've said that before — a cheap instant-read thermometer is maybe eight dollars and it'll answer this every single time instead of leaving you to guess.
In practice I just run the tap and let it climb, or mix a little hot into cold in a cup until it feels right. Some people microwave a cup of water for twenty or thirty seconds. Whatever gets you there is fine. It's not precision science. It's just not-cold.
Why this matters more here than in a recipe from somewhere else
This ties back to something I've mentioned before, but it's worth repeating because it burned me early. My first loaves overproofed constantly and I couldn't understand why — I was following a recipe from someone posting online who lived at sea level. Their timeline said let it rise four hours. I gave mine four hours, because that's what it said, and it sailed well past where it should have stopped. Doughy, collapsed, overproofed.
Things move faster here. We're at elevation, the air's dry, and depending on the season your water and your kitchen run colder or warmer than whoever wrote that recipe. It all adds up. Warm water speeds fermentation, cold water slows it, and if you follow someone else's clock instead of watching your own dough, you'll get surprised in one direction or the other.
That's my whole opinion on this, stated plainly: watch the dough, not the clock. It matters double at our elevation. The water temperature is one more variable that shifts your timeline, so once you fix it, you still have to actually look at what the dough is doing instead of trusting a number some stranger wrote down in a kitchen that isn't yours.
What this looks like week to week
Once you're warming your water consistently, your rises get more predictable. Not identical every time — your kitchen still runs warmer in July than in January — but you've taken one wildcard off the table. That's the goal. You can't control the season. You can control the water going into the jar.
Write down what temperature you used next to your feeding notes. Not because you need to be precise forever, but because when something goes sideways next month, you'll want to be able to rule this out first.
Before next time
Check your water temperature before your next feed — wrist test is fine, thermometer's better — and jot down roughly what it was next to that day's entry. See whether your starter moves differently.
- J