How do you fit sourdough baking into a busy schedule?
You do not babysit it for eleven hours; most of that is hands-off waiting. Make it an overnight dough: mix in the evening, let it bulk ferment while you sleep and work, then shape and bake when you are back. The fridge handles the rest of the scheduling, a shaped loaf holds there for up to about 24 hours, so you bake whenever suits you rather than on the dough's clock.
Answered by Hendrik, The Bread Code
From the book
To me, the sole purpose of cold-proofing is its ability to allow you to better manage the timing of the whole process. Assuming you finished shaping your dough at 10 pm, chances are you wouldn’t want to wait for another 2 hours to proof the dough and then another hour to bake it. In this case, you can move your dough directly to the fridge after shaping. Your dough will be proofing overnight in the fridge. Then it can be baked at any time the following day (there are a few exceptions; more on that later). This is especially handy for large-scale bakeries that use fridge-proofing extensively. Some of the doughs are proofed a day before and placed in the fridge. Early in the morning, they can be baked directly out of the fridge. Within 2 hours they will be ready to sell the first bread to morning customers. If throughout the day more bread is needed, they simply take some proofed dough out of the fridge and bake it. The time frame in which you can bake retarded dough is big. It can be as little as 6 hours later up to 24 hours later.
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