Dough Hydration Calculator
I made a simple Hydration Calculator. http://joshuacronemeyer.github.com/Flour-and-Water/ I've tried to use a few other online hydration calculators and there are so many textboxes that I don't know what to do with them all! This one has NO text fields. Instead, each colored box represents one or more variables: flour, water, starter. Just drag the box bigger or smaller to change the quantity and everything is calculated on the fly. I love to make sourdough and I'm always playing with my recipes, or finding myself with too little or much of one ingredient or another. I think this calculator makes it easy to play with a recipe and tailor it to your own needs. I'm no professional baker so it might not seem suitable for the pros, but I've checked it against a handful of my favorite recipes and found it gives accurate results. It is open source as well so if you are inclined to dabble in that sort of thing you can click the 'fork me on github' banner to get your own copy of the source code.
Comments
great tool! Is there any way you could distinguish the drag-line for the starter amount and the hydration level? I dragged the hydration to 99% (does it go to 100?) which caused the two lines to merge, and now I can't un-merge them. Maybe use the top corner for one and the bottom corner for the other? Thanks for making this.
Thanks for pointing out those problems. Next weekend I'll play with making the drag handles larger and creating a bit of offset so you can get the hydration up to a perfect 100% (that is usually what I keep mine at, so it is a tad annoying.) I didn't realize that going to 99% would make the starter hydration get stuck. Larger drag handles and an offset should fix that too.
Thanks again for the feedback. If you would like to comment or track this issue you can follow this link: https://github.com/joshuacronemeyer/Flour-and-Water/issues/#issue/1 And it does go to 100 now. The max starter hydration has been changed to 199%
How about a line for salt at say 2%?
you can comment and track this issue here. https://github.com/joshuacronemeyer/Flour-and-Water/issues/#issue/5 I've got some other bugs to fix before I get to this suggestion. If I come up with an appropriate solution to this problem I'll change the tool.
Love the tool. I bookmarked it.
As for salt, the suggested amount updated with the sliders, right? I always calculate 2% and adjust down to 1% or 1.5% if I need to -- but it's easy to do that adjustment in my head, no need for calculator. I say keep the tool simple.
Thanks,
Sam
I'm usually making a batch of dough of a certain weight and find your tool frustrating for that purpose. This works far better.
http://samartha.net/SD/SDcalc04.html
Larry
Larry,
I've got a feature in there that makes it pretty easy to hit a target weight. You can lock the hydration with the little lock icon next to the hydration % and then dragging flour or water up and down scales the weight by maintaining the locked hydration ratio.
I like the sliders better than text boxes because the old analog style input allows easier experimentation when i'm playing with a recipe... plus it is more fun.
But y'know different strokes.
Thanks for the feedback Larry.
nice looking & working tool, i've used it a number of times for simple hydration calculations.
it would be even better if you could enter text for the numbers :)
I like how minimalist the tool is. Only have to use one hand and a trackpad. You can leave the other free for stretching and folding the dough :-)
I won't be using it, because my own spreadsheets do the trick, but I love the way you've made this!
Hi Jaydot, would you be willing to share or post your spreadsheets? :)
Thanks!
I'm a retired software engineer and with all of the code i've written in the last 40 years i'm tired, quite frankly, of writing and designing new things.
I do some things out of necessity, but when someone does a novel concept like this? I like it.
It's clean, simple and graphically informative and it does what the application is intended for.
It would have been nice to have a salt bar because it is one of the 4 main ingredients and sometimes, when i make pizza dough, i'm pushing the salt a little higher.
For those of you that are interested in some very sophisticated tools that allow you to do some things with extra ingredients such as oil, sugar etc., you can go here
http://www.pizzamaking.com/dough_tools.html.
The expanded calculator has a check box for weight. I find it useful for all sorts of varities of different doughs, and, when I finish my entries, I copy and paste the weights into my Word document with a few notes on how this dough behaved.
I will probably use this tool occassionally , because i like to see relationships graphically.
thanks for the tool.
And thanks for the link to the pizza dough tools. Those are mighty sophisticated! I've created a placeholder for your salt suggestion here: https://github.com/joshuacronemeyer/Flour-and-Water/issues/#issue/5 I've got a few ideas for making the salt adjustable, but keeping things simple. There are a couple bugs I need to fix first, and thanks again for the very thoughtful feedback.
PS If you do follow that link, I recommend you check out that site and get yourself a github account. It is a great place to keep all that code you've written, and maybe a place to reconnect with the joys of building software!
This is something that I was so totally looking for! Very straight forward, though I would like the ability to be able to punch in numbers and not rely on the sliders (which are a little sensitive). Maybe one other addition could be the addition of other fields for extra ingredients (for experimental purposes), or at least to be able to manually change the salt content. But other than that (for me) I think this is awesome! Thank you!
Is there a way to lower the starter hydration to anything lower than 90%? This would be useful if you were using a stiffer starter.
I see how the starter percentage works...at some point I must have pushed the two sliders together, which at that point they stay linked together! I guess that would be a bug? :)
several people have found this problem. I intend to fix it. Meanwhile you can track and comment on this problem here. Thanks for the feedback!
I have a web tool too and I have too say yours is amazing. Don't listen to people saying it doesn't work for them, they don't understand the effort you have made. This is what we need in society, creative people. Focus on constructive criticism and ignore people who live to point out problems and complain. After all God gave us time to make things better. I will be back to check this out again!
Is there anyway I can get this tool on my desktop? I have a new Mac and am still learning how to do things. I, too, never seem have sourdough at the hydration requested in the recipe. Because of this problem, (and generally being in a hurry), I have restricted my baking to the book from which I got the sourdough recipe. This will really open up the amount of recipes I can try and also eliminate some of my sourdough starters!!! Thanks,
Pam
How to get a local copy of the Hydration Calculator:
- Download the ZIP archive at: https://github.com/joshuacronemeyer/Flour-and-Water/zipball/master
- Drag the "public" folder from the archive to your desktop (or another location where you want to store the calculator)
- Open the "index.html" page in the "public" folder in your web browser.
Voila! That's it.Yes! The best way (for google chrome users... Yes you should check out googles wonderful browser if you havent yet) is to go to the google app store for chrome and search for sourdough. My app is the only one. :)
People who can't or won't use chrome can try cranbo's instructions.
I realize I'm digging out a thread from about six years ago, so may fall on deaf ears but I'm just interested in how the lock function treats the starter. I usually bake a couple loaves at a time. The one time I scaled the recipe up to four loaves I also doubled the starter amount. This calculator leaves that fixed as you scale up/down the flour and water. Is it ok to have a smaller amount of starter? At what point would you also start scaling up the starter?
If you can dig out a thread from 6 years ago, then i get to comment on a comment from 1 yr. ago. ;) If I'm planning a larger batch I always scale up my starter proportionally to make sure I get lots of activity, and also I think the starter contributes a big part of the flavor, so it's important. Sometimes you just don't plan ahead, and I always just go for it anyway! It usually comes out fine.
I updated the calc today so i could use it on my phone. Touch gestures in the browser in 2011... but these days anybody can do it.
I don't know who is using the version i put in the chrome web store; the dashboard tells me there are users out there. Just thought I'd mention it here that the touch screen friendly version is there now. I had to uninstall/reinstall to get my copy updated.
Thanks so much to you Josh for doing this and since it seems ppl are still adding to this thread, thanks again.
For the rest of you also who have provided other tools links, choice is nice so we can get as easy or as complicated as we need too. Making slack pizza dough today so I wanted to check against my Anson Mills recipe for hydration.
Thank you
Sj
Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for!
I was converting all kinds of recipes by hand calculation! This tools helps me so much!
Just one little suggestion, the border of the rectangle is a bit too thin to drag. If you could make a tab or button to drag the border it would be super!
Anyways I am going to use this site everytime I need a tweak in my recipe! Thank you so much for writing this little program!