You’ve started baking a delicious sourdough loaf and leave your dough to rise for the first time.
Only when you return, you find the dough hardly risen at all – no beautiful gas bubbles or soft rounded dough ready to shape.
What can you do then to get your sourdough dough to rise faster so that you can get on with baking your bread?
Luckily there are a few factors that affect how your dough rises. You can adjust these to get your sourdough dough rising.
Watch the video below to find out more, or read on.
Want to learn to bake your first delicious sourdough loaf step-by-step with me? Join my on-demand Introduction to Sourdough Bread Baking course here and start today.
Check the temperature
The yeast in your sourdough starter digest the flour in your dough and produce the gas which rises your dough, creating a beautiful loaf.
And as I often say during my online bread making classes, treat your yeast just like you’d like to be treated!
Yeast like to keep cosy and warm and have plenty of food available. When they have those things, they produce gas at the quickest rate.
So if you’ve decided it’s a bit chilly, perhaps you’ve got an extra layer of clothes on or the heating’s been nudged on, chances are your yeast are a bit cold too. And when the yeast are cold, they still produce gas, but much more slowly. So temperature is something to always bear in mind should your sourdough be looking a bit sluggish – especially as we come to a change in seasons here in the UK and overnight temperatures drop into single figures (brrr!).
However, this isn’t to say you should be getting your dough as warm as possible. There’s a balance – too warm and, whilst your dough might rise more quickly, it won’t leave any time for the dough to develop flavour. Plus you risk the dough over-proofing and collapsing. And at temperatures above 37C (98F), the yeast will begin to die off, ending gas production.
So don’t leave your dough in a warm oven, on a radiator or in sunlight. It will likely be too warm and will dry out your dough too. Instead, find a cosy spot, with no drafts, for your dough to rise. And, if your sourdough starter is struggling to get going, consider finding it a warmer spot too.
Check how much starter you’re using
Your sourdough starter is a mixture of flour (I use dark rye flour) and water in which the natural yeasts have been allowed to flourish (and if you don’t have one yet, you can sign up to get my free step-by-step guide to making one here).
You can therefore control the initial amount of yeast added to your dough by increasing or decreasing the amount of starter you use. The amount of starter you use will depend on how active your starter is – ie how quickly it becomes bubbly and ready to use.
So if you’d like to increase the speed at which your dough rises, try using a little more bubbly starter to make up your dough. This is one of the key things I taught in my recent membership club online class about baking sourdough bread. When your starter is new, and might not be very active yet, you could add more to your dough than the recipe calls for, to help speed up the rate the dough rises at.
But once you have a bubbly, active and reliable starter, you can start to adjust, either up or down, the amount of starter you use to create your dough. This will affect how quickly (or slowly) your dough rises – a useful way to control timings and help fit your bread making around whatever else you need to be doing.
Make your sourdough starter with more water
Adjusting how you feed your starter before baking can also have an effect on how quickly or slowly your final dough rises.
If you followed my recent live sourdough starter challenge, you’ll have seen that we made quite a liquid, runny rye flour starter. This helps the yeast as they try to get established in your starter – the ingredients in the starter are more easily moved around and yeast have more access to food (the flour). You may therefore find that a more runny starter becomes bubbly and active more quickly.
Conversely, if you want to slow down your starter, try feeding with more flour or less water, and make a thicker paste. The starter will still become bubbly and active, but it may just take a little longer.
Want to learn more about baking your own delicious sourdough bread at home?
Get my free guide to making your own successful sourdough starter at home here.
Want to follow along step-by-step with me to bake your first sourdough loaf? Tried to bake a loaf using your starter before but the results just weren’t what you expected? Join my on-demand Introduction to Sourdough Bread Baking course online by clicking here and get started today.
I am ready to give up on sourdough. My bread just won’t rise. I have covered it with a damp towel, with plastic wrap, placed it under my microwave light, and it never rises. My house is at 70 degrees at all times. No drafts. Could elevation or flour be an issue. Please help!
I’m sorry to hear that. Don’t worry and please keep trying if you can. Focus on your starter first. Is it really bubbly and still rising when you start making your dough? What flour do you use in your starter? I use wholemeal rye flour as it produces a strong starter. You can get your copy of my guide to making your own successful sourdough starter for no charge at this link if that would be helpful: https://theepsombakehouse.co.uk/sourdough-starter-guide-email-sign-up/
Let me know how your sourdough is getting on. Rhiannon.
Where do you get wholemeal rye flour?
Hello – you can get wholemeal (dark) rye flour in larger supermarkets. Also search online as some mills sell directly to consumers.
What kind of flour do you use? Mine wouldn’t rise for nothing until I changed to whole wheat flour. Your bread will still taste the same even though it’s whole wheat.
For my starter I use organic dark (wholemeal) rye flour as it has a relatively higher amount of yeast naturally occurring on the grain. It makes a really active bubbly starter. For my breads, I tend to make these using unbleached white wheat flour but I do sometimes add wholemeal too. You may find wholemeal helps as yeasts naturally occur on the outside of the grain, which would be retained in a wholemeal flour. Many thanks for commenting – do you bake a lot of sourdough breads at home? Rhiannon.
I’ve got a sourdough starter that a FB neighbour shared with me. It’s nice and tangy, and I can get it bubbling if I keep it warm enough (it’s darned cold up here), and honestly, I’ve mainly been using it to make pancakes, but I’ve been feeding it unbleached white flour and I’m thinking it would be happier with wholemeal rye if I want to actually resume some bread baking?
That’s great to hear that your starter is bubbling away! You could use it to bake bread but baking with a rye flour starter can mean you need less starter initially. As you mention, you could start feeding a small portion of your wheat starter with rye flour – it will always have some wheat in it but will become a mainly rye starter eventually. Let me know how your sourdough bread turns out! Rhiannon.
My gluten free starter looked perfect. I made the dough, let it puff for a couple hours, refrigerator over night, took out in morning, kneaded a little, covered it and put on heating mat. It rose a little but not double. I put in draft free room with space heater and still not double after 13 hrs. Do I bake it or add more starter and try to have it rise agsin?
Hello, did you bake your loaf? I haven’t made a GF sourdough loaf but potentially the starter ran out of food with the first long rise? Try changing one thing at a time in your recipe, eg a shorter first rise next time, to see if this helps.
Hello hope your baking is going better then mine. I made whole wheat sourdough starter from scratch and now its been 2 weeks and this is my second batch of bread. the dough just doesn’t rise well, very dense. everything good until i put the dough in the refrigerator but when i pull it out sleeping beauty never wakes up. should i just leave it out over night on the counter?
the taste is good but she doesn’t want to get up and go back to work…
Thanks for your comment and that’s great to hear that you’re baking bread at home. If your bread isn’t turning out quite how you expected, try changing one thing at a time. This could be rising time or where you rise the dough, for example. Also, check you’re using enough water in your wholemeal dough. And do check out my Introduction to Sourdough Bread Baking course for a step-by-step guide on baking your first sourdough loaf at home. You can follow along at a time to suit you: https://thebakehouseclub.com/register/introduction-to-sourdough/ Rhiannon.
My starter is about a year and a half old and I’ve used the 1:1:1 ratio. Recently I’ve switched to a 1:5:5 ratio mainly because I can let it rise overnight and in the morning I’m ready to make my bread. My question is because of the higher ratio of starter, is this causing my bread to take much longer to bulk ferment and rise?
Hello, thanks for commenting. In response to your question, it depends what you add to your pre-dough to make your final dough. If you adjust the ingredients so that more flour is used in the pre-dough, but you end up with the same amount of dough as when you were using a 1:1:1 starter, it’s unlikely to have a great effect on how it rises. Have you changed anything else about your method?
I made a loaf yesterday and the first rise took 10 hrs., much longer than usual. The temperature in the house was around 78F. I used the same amount of flour that the recipe called for but substituted some wheat and rye flour for some of the AP flour. It was 350g of AP flour, 100 g of whole wheat and 25g of rye flour and 325g of water. It made a soft dough. I didn’t change the method of rising, shaping, etc.
That does sound a lot slower – perhaps use more starter to water/flour when feeding your starter and try refreshing twice before you start baking to get it very active. Using some wholemeal and rye flours will also affect how your dough rises.
Hi my starter won’t rise i have tryed everything and it won’t rise what should I do?
Hello, thanks for reading and commenting. Sorry to hear that about your sourdough starter. What type of flour are you using? I always use dark (wholemeal) rye flour as I find it creates a more stable starter more quickly. Try to change one thing at a time to see what works. You may need to feed more frequently to build up the yeast too. If you like, you can sign up for my step-by-step guide to making your own sourdough starter with rye flour here: https://theepsombakehouse.co.uk/sourdough-starter-guide-email-sign-up/.