![]() I've browsed through a lot of baking books and read a lot baker's math info online. I will create a calculator based on the table below found in the The Bread Bakers Guild of America Formula Layout Standards Part II (orange fields are inputs): It certainly simplifies the math, so one doesn't have to obsess about converting levain hydration percentages from one recipe to another. Most interesting to me is that the "seed" (".the portion of the sourdough or levain system used to inoculate the "starter".) is treated as a separate, discrete ingredient. I started digging into the BBGA articles and I have to say that they were a revelation. I referred him, as I refer you to the BBGA technical articles. I got into a fight with a cookbook author on this very topic when he expressed to me that he had to do things wrong because his formulas were complex. It works very well and with formulas that are more complex than you can imagine. ![]() Sorry to be curt, but I have written the instructions for properly doing baker's percents on these pages so often that I get discouraged because every new generation of bakers feels a need to invent their own. Optionally, the percentage of the preferment can be expressed as a percentage of the flour in the final dough, but it isn't required. Then you do a simple subtraction to get the composition of the final dough which will then include the preferment as an ingredient. Is it 100% hydration? 60%? - that should be expressed in the formula. Then using the percentage of the flour in the preferment, write the formula for the preferment. It is how people experienced with formula development and analysis understand the formula. Start with the composition of the overall formula - what, when all is mixed is the hydration of the dough, what are the percentages of additional ingredients? These will not change depending on the hydration of the preferment. But if you write anything more than a simple flour, salt water, yeast, plus preferment, you will watch you system become cumbersome. If you want to write formulas any which way, feel free to do so. A lot of beautiful blogs with beautiful bread exist with the baker's percentages being - wrong. A lot of books go to publishers with the baker's percents being - wrong. A lot of people do baker's percents - wrong. Writing formulas by expressing the preferment as a single ingredient and as a percentage of flour in the overall formula is just - wrong. That is, frankly, because they start from a poor foundation. Yes, there are a lot of comments on a lot of threads and a lot of confusion in them. I see this in a lot of popular baking books and it just isn't right. ![]() The expression of the percentage hydration of the preferment is left in the "comments" section rather than being introduced as a part of the formula. Yes, you have the percentage of flour in the preferment in your numbers, but then you also use the percentage of total water in the preferment. Note that only starter and water amounts changed in the Adjusted Recipe. Here's a screenshot of bakers percentage tables for a recipe calling for 100% hydration levain and adjustments if using an 80% hydration levain. ![]() ![]() I'll modify the calculator to consider adjuncts and scaling up/down in some future version. Appreciate any feedback on whether I got this right. By doing this, the math shows that my PFF bakers percentage will be maintained.Īssuming the above is correct, I built a calculator that takes as input flour, water, levain mass and levain hydration (recipe and your own), then builds bakers percentage tables for the existing and modified recipe. nuts or dried fruit), say 50g of nuts to an 800g total dough weight, then I must decrease all other ingredients by 6.25% (50/800) to maintain the total dough weight. If I add an adjunct not called for in the recipe (e.g. When using a levain with a different hydration percentage than called for in a recipe, PFF and dough hydration percentages must be maintained. For completeness, pre-fermented flour (PFF) and water in the levain should be included in bakers percentage calculations. So after many articles about bakers math/percentages, a few things seem apparent when I convert recipes: I maintain a 100% hydration starter, and often find myself using recipes that specify 80% hydration levain. ![]()
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