Hi, I don’t know if I can still ask questions here, but I’ll try. I made my first sourdough bread today. I followed the procedure Jack described, the only difference being that I used organic rye flour to make the starter (white bread flour to make the final dough). The starter seems fine, active, and smells fine, slightly sour. While making the final dough, I did find that I needed much more flour than stated in the recipe to make the dough workable. It was very wet. I think I ended up adding at least 1 1/2 cup of extra flour and even more while kneading. The problems I have were with the baking. I preheated my fan oven to 260 C for one hour. I slashed the dough with a razor, but I was unsure as to how deep the slashes were supposed to be. Put the loaf in the oven. After 15 minutes, it smelled a bit burned and when I looked, the bottom was already charred. On top, one of the slashes had sort of burst, with dough bulging out. I took the bread out after 20 minutes otherwise the bottom would have been charcoal. I waited a couple of hours to slice into it. Now the inside looked very funny: a combination of very dense, compact, wettish dough and HUGE holes. At some spots the crust (very thin) was separated from the actual bread by a large hole. The whole thing was inedible and I had to throw it out. What went wrong?