February 19, 2006
Bakers Percentages
Time to review the bakers formulas and see if this time I can get it right.
I’m going to make a 1 and 1/2 pound loaf and I want 75% hydration (wet - makes tunnels)
Total Weight (TW) = 24oz
Hydration = 0.75 (75%)
Total Flour Weight (TFW) = TW / (1+hydration) = 24 / 1.75 ==> 13.75oz Flour.
Water = TW * hydration = 24 * .75 ==> 10.375 oz water.
Rounding into eighths (which is all my scale will do on ounces), that should produce a 1 5/8 lb loaf at 77% hydration. (I’m leaving out the salt weight, bench flour and any additional water added in kneading). Now we have to deal with the starter which has both flour and water. When you make a single loaf of bread, these percentages can easily get thrown off.
Tonight, I’m a bit of a hurry so I mixed up 2 oz of flour, 2oz of water and 4 oz of starter (total of 8 oz). The starter was just fed a few days ago. It shouldn’t take long to get happy and in fact, a fews hours after I mixed it and I’m writing this, it’s about to get very active. Another hour or two in the warm spot.
Because I’m working in such small amounts (compared to X pounds of bread or more), the percentage of flour and water in the starter could be important. especially when the starter is a large part of the total weight. I don’t know the hydration percentage of the starter in the jar. It’s fairly thick. I’m guessing 90%.
If you start with a teaspoon of starter and build it up 50/50 by weight several times to the amount you want, you can predict (control) what the hydration of the starter will be. But I’m a hurry tonight which is a fine reason to type all this and maybe think about it. If my 90% guess is correct, then the starter is going to add 4.21 oz of flour to the total and 3.71 oz of water and I subtract them from the 13.75 and 10.375 meaning I should mix the 8oz of starter with 9.54 oz of flour and 6.667 oz water. (add them up to get near 24 oz, 1.5 pound)
But what if my starter is 110% hydration? More water than flour. More water would have to be subtracted from the total of 10.375 oz water, so less water would have to be added to the mix. And a bit more flour. That hasn’t been my experience but I’m getting confused. The starter is ready, I’d better get unconfused.