Bakers percentage question
I do apologize up front if this topic has been talked about or is in the wrong category. I have read about bakers percentage before, and I even have a spreadsheet that I use to break down the percentages of my yeast products.
The issue or question I have is this. Does the recipe dictate the percentages or does the percentages dictate the recipe?
Meaning, is there a formula that I must follow to know how much of each ingredient to use based on the weight of the flour. I will elaborate: I have a recipe that calls for 3.685 kilograms of flour. My next ingredients are milk, yeast, sugar, salt etc. My question is, is there a set % that I need to use to get the quantity of the other ingredients? Or, do I take the other ingredients that I already have weights of and calculate the percentages of the ingredients based on the flour (100%)? Does this make sense?
In other words, I cannot see how a bakers percentage formula will help me when I am baking. I have the quantity of each ingredient in the recipe. This recipe works great for me. It tells me how much milk, how much salt, sugar etc. that goes in. How does a bakers percentage help me out? I am still not making my point. Here is an example: I have 3.685Kg of flour. I then have 900g of sugar. The % of sugar to flour is 24.423%, because that is how much I use. But, is that the correct amount of sugar that I need?
It appears that the bakers percentage is an after the fact formula, showing what % each ingredient is compared to the flour. This is good if I want to give this recipe to someone else but only give them the weight of the flour, then the percentage of the other ingredients. Am I barking up the wrong tree? If so, can someone explain this to me?
Bakers percentages help with comparison and scaling. If I'm thinking about enriching my bread it is useful to be able to quickly examine other recipes to see the bakers percentage of honey, eggs, etc. in them. I bake tiny loaves with about 200g of flour total; if I want to use your recipe, my first step would be to calculate the percentages and then scale.
They are after the fact. The weights determine the percentages.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks again!
In professional baking, standard recipes are written for 100kg of flour. For that amount of flour, all other ingredients are given correspondingly. 2 kg salt, 3kg yeast, etc.
Each specific bakery would scale it accordingly, depending on the size of their operations. Like on your case, your bakery might want to make a batch of rolls from 3.865 kg of flour.
If you remove the weight units, kg or lb, g or oz, it looks like percentages:100% flour, 2% salt, etc.
How can that help you? Well, it allows you to compare any recipe to another recipe and see how simple or complicated it is, how lean or how enriched, how expensive or easy, etc. If the recipe that you want to use requires 25%of sugar, you know that it's a highly enriched dough, whereas looking at 3.865 and 900 does not make it as obvious.
- is there a set % that I need to use to get the quantity of the other ingredients?
- for a specific bread yes. Only if your goal is to recreate a specific bread. Any deviation in percentages larger than 5%would make a different bread, it would no longer be the same bread. 5% deviation is the rule of thumb in baking.
In other words, it does not matter if you add 24% or 25% of sugar. The bread would still be the same. Adding 25kg of sugar per 100kg flour and 24kg of sugar per 100kg flour differs very little, only 4% difference between them (25/24 *100%=4%), it would not alter the nature of the resulting bread, the rate of fermentation, the height of the loaves, their taste, etc.
The other important aspect is the ability to replicate a tried and true recipe to the size that you want for instance i often make a batch of buns for the keep fit group and i need to make 24 so if i want to make 100g buns i will require 2400g dough.
if i have a dough recipe and its formula is in % i add up all of those ingredient percentages and come up with a total percentages number lets say it is 200%. i then divide the dough required 2400g in this case by 200% and it will give me the value of 1% for this particular dough which would be 12g i then apply that to each ingredient % in the formula so flour @ 100% x 12 = 1200g and so on down the list. As a double check i always add up the weights applied to all the ingredients and it should come to the desired weight withing a gram or two depending on the decimal point adjustment rounding up.
This is important if you are wanting to produce certain amounts but sticking to a set formula / recipe. It is also the way that a recipe can be quickly evaluated by others if trouble shooting, its easier to spot glaring anomalies.