When Spring Finally Clicked (And the Question I'd Been Too Embarrassed to Ask)

⏱ 4 min read

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from doing everything right and still getting a flat, dense loaf. You know the one. You followed the recipe. You watched your starter double. You did your folds, shaped confidently, cold proofed overnight. And then you opened the oven and got something that looked like a particularly ambitious doorstop.

That was me, about three weeks into April last year. The clocks had gone forward, the weather had that soft London warmth to it, Borough Market was full of people eating outside with that slightly surprised look Londoners get when the sun actually shows up. And my bread was refusing to cooperate. The thing is, I had been baking long enough to know that something was off. I just could not pinpoint what.

The Problem With Spring (Nobody Really Warns You)

Winter baking is actually quite forgiving once you get used to it. Your kitchen is cold, fermentation is slow, and you have a wide margin of error. You can wander off, put on a record, lose track of time and still come back to dough that is only just ready. Spring changes everything. The ambient temperature creeps up, your starter gets more active, and suddenly the bulk ferment you were doing for five hours is done in three and a half. If you do not notice, you get over-fermented dough that spreads like it has given up on life.

That was my issue. I had not adjusted anything. Same timings, same ratios, same process. Just a warmer flat. Classic debugging failure, honestly. In tech, when something breaks and you have not changed the code, you check the environment. I had not checked the environment.

The fix, once I understood it, was straightforward enough: mix with cooler water, shorten bulk ferment, watch the dough rather than the clock. But actually working out which variable was causing the problem took me longer than it should have, mostly because I was going in circles trying to diagnose it from memory and vibes alone.

Getting Honest About What I Did Not Know

This is the bit I find people do not talk about enough. You get to a certain point as a home baker where you feel like you should have figured it out by now. Asking basic questions feels embarrassing. You start second-guessing your instincts instead of just asking someone who knows.

I ended up using the DoughRise Coach to work through what had gone wrong. Not because I expected a magic answer, but because I needed to explain my process to something patient and knowledgeable, and have it ask me the right questions back. It pulled together a personalised bake plan adjusted for the warmer conditions, walked me through where my timing had likely gone wrong, and flagged that my starter, which had been brilliantly reliable all winter, was now peaking about 90 minutes earlier than I was accounting for. That one insight changed everything.

Here is the practical version of what I changed, in case you are hitting the same wall right now:

• Drop your water temperature. If you were using 30°C water in winter, try 22 to 24°C in spring. It slows the initial fermentation and gives you back some control.
• Do the poke test, not the clock. Bulk ferment is done when the dough is puffy, slightly domed at the edges, and springs back slowly (not immediately) when you poke it. Time is just a rough guide.
• Watch your starter peak, not just its size. In a warmer kitchen it will peak faster and decline faster too. Catch it just before the top flattens out and you will get a much livelier dough.
• Consider an earlier cold proof entry. If your shaped loaf goes into the fridge slightly under-proofed, that is fine. It will continue proving slowly overnight. Going in over-proofed is much harder to recover from.

The Loaf That Came After

The bake I did the following Saturday was one of those genuinely satisfying ones. Nice spring in the oven, good ear, crust that crackled when it came out. I had a couple of mates round that evening and we got through almost the whole loaf with some decent butter and a bit of leftover soup. There is something about eating bread you actually baked that makes even a pretty ordinary Friday night feel like a proper occasion.

Spring is genuinely a great season for baking if you adapt to it. Your starter is lively, your kitchen smells incredible, and the longer evenings mean you can start a bake after work and not be shaping in the dark. You just need to stop treating it like it is still February.

If you are finding your loaves have gone sideways since the weather changed and you cannot work out why, sometimes the most useful thing is just having something that will actually help you diagnose the problem properly. The DoughRise Coach does exactly that, with unlimited messages, technique guidance, and bake plans built around your actual situation rather than generic advice. It is all over at doughrise.store if you want to take a look.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by hello aesthe on Unsplash