Baking Formulas

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oo7wazzy on 22 Feb 2017 at 05:17

HI All Fresh Loaf fans

 

I want some help on working out my formula for baking sourdough or any bread for that matter. I have the original Tartine recipe for the rustic country loaf that uses 1000g flour and makes 2 loaves. these loaves are quite big so I thought about using the recipe and dividing by 4 to get loaves that are roughly 500g each.

But what I want to know is, if I start with the finished loaf weight eg: 700g, how do I work the formula to get the individual ingredients knowing the percentages of all the ingredients ?

 

Thanks

 

 

Toast

Lechem on 23 Feb 2017 at 05:02

New weight / old weight

Then multiply each ingredient by that answer

Go to 4 decimal points for the first answer, for greater accuracy, then round to the nearest whole number when working out each ingredient. 

 

An Example Original Recipe:

 

500g flour

300g water

10g salt

150g starter

Total = 960g

 

But you want a 700g loaf!

700/960 = 0.7292

Now you multiply each ingredient by 0.7292 (and round up/down to the nearest whole number) to get your new recipe.

 

500g flour x 0.7292 = (364.6) 365g

300g water x 0.7292 = (218.76) 219g

10g salt x 0.7292 = (7.292) 7g

150g starter x 0.7292 = (109.38) 109g

Your new total = 700g

the loaf's flour and water and its hydration is to use 1 for the flour and add the % of water required.  IF it is a 75% hydration bread , just divide the 700 g of the total loaf by 1.75.  That gves you 400 g of flour and 700 - 400 = 300 g of water.  You always have 2% salt so 400*.02 = 8 g of salt.

Many recipes are only given in baker's percentage a typical recipe might read - rememner flour always equals 1

 

Levain

12% pre-fermented whole wheat flour @ 100% hydration

Dough

48% Whole Wheat flour

40% bread flour

88% overall total hydration 

2% salt.

Then you pick the size of bread you want or fits your pan or DO and solve for the flour like the example above.

 

Check out the tutorial on baker's percentage here at King Arthur Flour. What I do is create tables in Excel with the original formula in one column, the baker's percentage in the next column then a table that figures out all the ingredient weights for a number (1, 2, 4 or 6) of loaves at 750 grams each finished dough weight. It's a bit complicated to describe in detail here but if you're handy with spreadsheets it works well.