October 20, 2006 - 8:59am
An updated recipe calculator
I did more work on the recipe calculator (or whatever it should be called) last night. It is getting pretty neat.
Recipe: Scale Factor: Base Unit kg lbI'd love to be able to flip this around and let people enter their ingredients and have it calculate the baker's percentages for them. Just a matter of finding the time to work on it.
Please select a recipe from the menu above.
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So, did you do this in Excel or how are you going about this? This is a project my wife and I were going to undertake this winter when we have the time. I'd love to get the recipes that I normally make into formulas like this where I can alter how much is made and have the amounts right there to print off.
Ed
I'm doing it all in javascript. Do a "view source" on this page and you can see all the code.
If you download the right chunk you should be able to run it in a browser from your hard drive too. That is what I was doing while I was developing it. When this gets a little more solid I'll try to encapsulate it in a single javascript library file, so that it is easy to download and run anywhere.
Agreed that letting users build up their own formulas is where this should go. I'm working hard to make this extensible, so I think it actually won't be that difficult to do when I can find the time.
One of the hardest parts of this is coming up with the density of each ingredient. I'm using water the baseline, so it is assigned a density value of 1. Flour I'm assigning .5, so I can then calculate that if 1 pound of water is equal to 2 cups, then 1 pound of flour must be 4 cups. I'm scouring my cookbooks to come up with a list of approximate weights-to-measures factors for each ingredient, but the approximations vary widely from book-to-book. I've seen a pound of flour as everything from 3 to 5 cups! So this is an inexact science. I'm shooting for somewhere down the middle.
The minute I turn this over to users to generate their own formilas they are going to come up with new ingredients I hadn't thought to include and for which I do not have density information. Going to have to keep the scale handy!
Floyd,
With this formula/scaling tool that you are developing, and the sourdough spreadsheets that JMonkey is building, you'll need to add another category in the same line that carries "Home", "Forums", "Lessons", "Book Reviews," etc. Dunno what you'd call it. "Toolkit", maybe?
I suspect that other tools will be developed, too, and we all need a place to keep our tools, right?
PMcCool
Yeah, I agree. I was thinking I'd just add "Tools" to the navigation and add a node there.
I've got some other updates to do this weekend. I'll try to get that together then.
I added it: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/tools
I'll flesh out the copy in the next few days. This evening I worked on the convertor tool, which is getting pretty neat. I can code. Or I can write. But when I try to do both in the same evening it gets ugly...
I don't know javascript so I don't know if this is hard to add? Can you change the "input" factor?
I have my formulas in excel, which I find handy (see JMonkeys post for other cool excel spreadsheets).
For mine, I have the total dough weight as the plug-in value. For example, If I want to make 3 2-pound loaves, I plug in 6 pounds and it calculates the rest of the formula for me.
Or, say you've built up your sourdough chef/levain, but can't decide what to do with it--could you plug in that amount and build a formula for that?
Just thinkin' not trying to make more work for you! Ha ha.
- breadnerd
I was thinking along those lines while driving home today. Most people want to make a certain number of loaves of bread, so I should figure out a way to give options for number and types of loaves and calculate the proportions of the ingredients accordingly. Yeah... it isn't a trivial amount of work, but it certainly is doable.
Check it out now:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/tools/convertor
That's awesome, and fast!
Thanks very much
I was wondering if there is a tool to use to determine nutritional values, fats, carbs fiber, sugar, sodium?
Awesome work! This is great! I want to be able to do this in Excel, any pointers? In the meantime I will use your converter, it really helps!
Thanks!
David Aplin
nifty little devise for the basic recipes.