Five Reasons Sourdough Is Harder in Australian Heat Than Anyone Tells You

Every sourdough recipe you have ever read was written in a cold kitchen.

Not deliberately. It is just that most of the people writing them live somewhere mild, where a kitchen sits at 20 or 21 degrees and stays there. So they tell you to bulk ferment for five hours, and they are right, for them.

Then you follow the same recipe in a Kalgoorlie summer, your kitchen is 34 degrees, and by hour five you have a puddle.

You assume you did something wrong. You did not. You followed instructions written for someone else’s kitchen. Here is what heat is actually doing to your dough.

1. Your dough is fermenting much faster than the recipe assumes

Warm dough ferments faster than cool dough. That is the whole thing, and it sounds obvious until you see the numbers.

At 24 degrees, you might get five to seven hours of bulk fermentation. At 28 degrees, three to four. At 30 degrees and above you are in fast territory and you need to be checking your dough properly, not wandering off to hang washing.

So a recipe that says “bulk ferment for five hours” is not lying to you. It is just answering a question you did not ask.

2. The window between perfect and ruined is much smaller than you think

This is the one that catches people, and it is the reason heat is not just a matter of adjusting times.

In a cool kitchen, if you are half an hour late to your dough, it is fine. You have room to be a bit disorganised, which is useful when you have kids.

In a 35 degree kitchen, dough can go from perfect to overproofed in under an hour.

Not slightly overproofed. Flat, slack, structureless, will not hold a shape. You went to school pickup and came back to a different dough.

That is what a flat loaf usually is. Not a bad recipe. Not a bad baker. Just a dough that kept working while you were not looking.

Want more practical Goldfields notes like this?
Join Notes From the Kitchen Table, my monthly email from Kalgoorlie-Boulder. 👉Join here

3. Room temperature is not dough temperature, and only one of them matters

Everyone checks the thermometer on the wall. Almost nobody checks the dough.

Dough temperature is the number that actually drives fermentation, and it is not the same as the temperature of the room. Your dough carries the warmth of your water, your flour, your hands, and the friction of mixing. It generates its own heat as it ferments.

So the room can read 26 while the dough is sitting at 30, and you would never know unless you put a probe in it.

A cheap probe thermometer will teach you more about your own kitchen in a fortnight than any recipe will.

4. Your starter is not dying, it is starving

In heat, a starter runs through its food much faster. It peaks earlier, collapses earlier, and gets hungry faster than the feeding schedule you read about online.

A hungry starter smells sharp, almost like nail polish remover. It might have a layer of dark liquid sitting on top, which is called hooch. Both of these things look alarming and neither of them means your starter is dead.

Stir the hooch back in. Feed it. In summer, feed it more often than you think you need to.

The only thing that genuinely means something is wrong is a pink or orange tinge, and that one you throw out.

5. Nobody told you any of this, so you assumed the problem was you

This is the real cost of it.

Women give up on sourdough in this country all the time, and not because it is beyond them. They give up because they followed a recipe carefully, it failed, they tried again, it failed again, and somewhere in there they decided they just were not any good at it.

You are not the variable. Your kitchen is.

Once you stop watching the clock and start watching the dough, hot-climate baking gets much easier. It is not harder than baking in Melbourne. It is just different, and nobody wrote the instructions down for you.

So here is where to start.

What to do next

Stop reading time and start reading the dough. That means knowing what a healthy, active starter actually looks and smells like, because everything else follows from it.

Read: What does a healthy sourdough starter look and smell like