How Long Should I Let My Sourdough Bread Rest? (+Pictures)

I’m sure that just like me you can barely restrain yourself from eating the sourdough bread the minute you take it out of the oven. But doing so will be a big mistake, and not just because it’s extremely hot. Sourdough bread needs to rest in order to fully develop its taste and texture.

On average sourdough bread should be left to rest between 4 and 8 hours. During this time the bread continues to cook on the inside. Cutting the sourdough bread too soon will stop the cooking process and result in an uncooked, gummy bread.

But depending on the size of the loaf, as well as the flour used, the time that you will have to wait can either increase as well as decrease. So let’s see how the size of the loaf and the flour used determine how long you have to let your sourdough bread rest.

Different Types of Flour Need Different Resting Times

Here is a table showing on average how much you should let a sourdough bread rest depending on the size of the loaf, and the type of flour used.

As you can see the bigger the loaf is the more time it needs to rest, as expected. But what makes an even bigger difference than the size is the type of flour used.

Some types of flour will retain more water than other types of flour, and as a result, the bread will need a lot more time to rest. While resting the water that is in the bread will slowly evaporate. So the more water the flour has absorbed, the more time it will need to rest.

In the case of some types of flour, like rye, the amount of time might seem absurd but rye flour can absorb huge quantities of water, and the bread made with rye is usually denser than that made with white flour, so the water will need considerably more time to evaporate.

But let’s see what will happen if you cut the bread too soon.

What Happens if You Cut the Sourdough Bread Without Letting It Rest

I’m sure that just like me you can barely hold yourself from eating the bread as soon as you take it out of the oven. In my opinion, this is when the bread looks the most appealing, which makes it hard to resist, and the delicious smell doesn’t make things easier.

But despite all this, if you were to try and taste it you would be met with disappointment.

First of all the bread can’t be sliced properly, while the crust is hard and cooked, the inside is not cooked so after the knife gets past the crust it will be met with a gluey dough that can’t hold its shape and it will stick to the knife, making it impossible to cut anything resembling a slice of bread.

Here is a picture of my knife after cutting a sourdough bread too early.

And even if you were to skip over slicing the bread and simply tear a piece of bread, that piece of bread will be raw on the inside and the inside will stick together forming a dense piece of uncooked bread.

In this picture, you can see a loaf that I made and sliced after letting it rest for just 2 minutes after taking it out of the oven. You can clearly see that the inside is still full of moisture which gives it an undesirable texture.

So while the bread might look appetizing you will be met with a complete disappointment if you were to cut it too soon.

Can You Leave Sourdough Bread Rest for Too Long?

While it is possible to leave sourdough bread rest for too long, nothing as bad as not leaving it rest enough will happen.

When the bread has rested for just enough the inside will still be warm, and there will still be some moisture inside that gives it a little bit of springiness and greatly improves the texture and taste.

If you let the bread rest for too long some of its qualities will be lost and the crust will become slightly harder. The inside won’t be as soft and as tasty, the difference in texture is much more noticeable than the change in taste. But even so, it’s a lot better than cutting the bread too soon.

How Do I Know That My Bread Has Rested for Enough Time?

There won’t be too many signs that a loaf of bread has spent enough time resting. One good way to tell is usually by seeing how hot the exterior is, but even then it’s easy to get things wrong.

In my opinion, the best way to know if a loaf has rested for enough is through trial and error, and by following what the recipe tells you.

I can’t even count how many sourdough loaves I’ve cut way too early when I was just starting out. But over time I started to get a general idea of how long I should leave a bread rest. And from my experience, I made the table at the start of the article.

But how fast a bread will cool depends on external factors, like temperature and humidity. So some people might have to wait a little longer than others for their bread to rest.

So to avoid making as many mistakes as I did, use the table, and follow what the recipe says, and adjust things accordingly after you’ve seen the results.

Depending on the type of sourdough bread that you are making you might have to wait a while for it to rest, so it’s perfectly understandable to want to speed up the process, so let’s discuss some methods that people have been using to cool down their bread faster and which work and which don’t.

How to Cool Your Bread Faster and How Not To

Leaving the Bread Outside, or by the Window

This is the most common thing people do when they want to cool down something fast, they either take it outside or open the window and place it in front of it.

This is common for a reason, it works. I do this all the time when I want my food to cool down faster. But while this works for most types of food, you shouldn’t do this with bread.

Sourdough bread is not completely cooked when you take it out of the oven, the inside is mostly raw. It still needs time to cook on the inside. Taking the bread outside will cool the bread too soon and the inside will be raw.

Putting the Sourdough Bread in the Refrigerator

This is more or less the same thing as taking the bread outside. This is not a good method to cool down your sourdough bread.

This method can actually be harmful to the food in your fridge, while putting something hot in the fridge won’t damage the fridge itself, it will considerably raise the temperature inside and the food stored in it might spoil.

Using a Cooling Rack

Using a cooling rack can help your bread cool down faster, without affecting the bread in any negative way.

This is because a cooling rack doesn’t affect the temperature of the bread in any way, it simply lifts the bread up, reducing the contact surface, thus allowing the bread to cool down faster.

So basically the cooling rack doesn’t make the bread cool down faster, it actually removes obstacles that make it cool down slower.

Before I bought a cooling rack I used to put two cups upside down on the table and place the loaf on top of them. This is not entirely as efficient as a cooling rack, but it had good results. SO if you don’t have a cooling rack you can try doing this.

Spraying the Sourdough Bread With Cold Water

This will do nothing to cool down the bread, the only thing it will do is it will make the crust of the bread mushy. This is perfectly fine if this is what you wanted to do, but if you were looking to cool down your bread this won’t help.

Other Cooling Methods

As you can see there are no proper ways of cooling down your beard faster without ruining it. This is because sourdough bread, as well as all types of bread, is not ready the moment you take them out of the oven. While they might look ready, the interior is mostly raw, and it’s still cooking with the heat remaining inside.

Cooling the bread any faster than it normally would, will stop the cooking process, and you will end up with raw bread.

You can use a cooling rack, as we discussed the rack doesn’t actually cool the bread down any faster, it just ensures that the cooling process won’t take any longer than it needs to.

Final Thoughts

Another thing that I want to add in the article but couldn’t find a proper place for is that the crust also influences how long you have to let your sourdough bread rest. To put it simply, the softer the crust is the easier it is for the water inside to escape. There are quite a few things that you can do to make the crust softer, some can be done after baking, some before, and some while the loaf is in the oven.

If you want to know what those things are you can check them out in my article: Sourdough Bread With a Super Soft Crust in 4 Easy Steps, while you won’t find a recipe in the article you will find many small and simple things that you can do to make any type of sourdough bread have a soft, or a crispy crust, and all of those things can be incorporated in all sourdough bread recipes.

So, I would say that the average time that a sourdough bread should be left to rest is between 4 and 8 hours. But as you’ve seen depending on the size of the loaf and the flour used, the time can increase to more than 24 hours.

And while this might seem like a lot, remember that you are not just waiting for the bread to cool down, you are waiting for the bread to cook. The rest time is part of the cooking process.

If you don’t want to wait that long, one thing that I often find myself doing is making smaller loaves. For a 0.5 lb bread, you only have to wait 1 hour for it to rest, while for a 1 pound loaf you have to wait 4 hours. So if you want to eat a slice of sourdough bread as soon as possible go for a smaller loaf.

And if you find yourself craving sourdough bread from time to time one other thing that I like doing is freezing it. I know most food loses a lot of taste if frozen, but I found a method to freeze sourdough bread without losing any of its taste and texture, if you want to find out how you can also do it, check out my blog post: How to Freeze Sourdough Bread Without Losing Taste or Texture.