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After overnight refrigeration, should the bread dough be brought to room temperature before baking?
It’s not necessary to bring the dough up to room temperature though if your baker is ceramic, to limit the risk of thermal shock, it’s safest to put a layer of parchment paper between the dough and ceramic.
If I don’t have any sort of baking vessel, and just plan to use a loaf pan or cookie sheet, what would the baking instructions be?
No worries if you don’t have a fancy baking dish, you can totally use a loaf pan or cookie sheet instead. For the loaf pan, just keep an eye on it and check it with a toothpick after about 30-40 minutes. And for the cookie sheet, make sure to space your goodies out and keep an eye on 'em since they’ll probably cook faster than in a baking dish.
Yes, both are doable. Though I’d bake at a lower oven temp for a pan loaf, between 350 and 450F. And if you put your dough on a baking sheet in the open oven, don’t bother with the thirty minute preheat as that is intended to get the baking vessel up to temperature. The oven air is up to temp usually after about 15 minutes.
Here are a couple relevant FAQs to check out. Good luck!
I am new to sourdough baking. When the recipe calls for ripe sourdough starter/levain, do you have to do anything to the starter or just weigh out some? I have seen in other books, to mix some with water and flour before adding to the other ingredients. I did not see a step in the recipe to do that.
A ripe starter/levain has a large population of microbes ready to consume the sugars in a dough (starch in flour is converted to sugar via enzymes that are activated when the flour gets wet).
The way to get that large population of yeast and bacteria is to feed the starter and let it expand/feed for several hours, usually until it has doubled or even tripled in size in a clear jar. You can mark the level just after feeding with a rubberband around the jar.
You can make bread with unripe starter too, but it will take longer to rise, sometimes a bit longer and sometimes 24 hours or more, depending on whether the starter was, for example, ripened yesterday and then immediately refrigerated, versus ripened two weeks ago, left to deflate at room temp (starve) and then refrigerated.
Here is some reading that can help you understand these variables and how to care for your sourdough starter:
I have made almost 100 loaves of no-knead sourdough using the 50/50 recipe on this site. This kid friendly version looks interesting. About how long does the bulk fermentation take before you put the dough in the fridge? I know there would be a lot of variables but I am trying to think about how to schedule the tasks for the recipe. When to start mixing etc. and how will that convert into when I could bake.
I think you’re looking at around 5 hours from mixing to 50-75% expansion – if your starter was ripe and kitchen/dough temp is in the 70-75F range.