For example, the recipe might say: Bread Flour 80%, Whole Wheat Flour 15%, and Rye Flour 5%. Personally I prefer just treating all ingredients as relative weights, and only convert to bakers math if needed. That is in large part because I wrote the software that is used on the production floor which spits out ingredient weights in grams, and no bakers math needed. It also keeps it simple for the employees, so they don’t have to learn how these ratios work.
I’ll also mention that the absolute best book on bread ever is the Modernist Bread set [0]. It’s pricey, but there are extremely well explained reasons behind certain methods, and debunking a lot of long held beliefs such as the efficacy of the autolyse.
I ask because I'm always interested in hearing how non-programmers end up programming. I've long held the opinion that we (tech that is) should try to make things more programmable by users (e.g. game scripting, excel, the "citizen developer" world of sharepoint), etc and like to hear how non-tech folks use programming to solve problems.
But to your point, most ERP planning software for bakeries sucks badly, like really badly. One of the prominent ones you can purchase today runs off a JET database from the 90s, with the “cloud” version just being Citrix access to a VM. but they all seem to universally require you to print out paper every day for every shift, so a ton of people just fall back on Excel (using bakers math) to pan production, daily. My software runs on an iPad that is kept at each station for kind of shift, and it spits out packing sheets and invoices from Quickbooks, and integrates with our delivery route planner. It would be a full time job to be calculating everything from mix quantities to how to pack the final product, without mistakes, 7 days a week.
There definitely needs to be better tools for the lay-person though. None of my staff can make changes to our custom software, but also it is basically impossible to recreate it with low/no-code tools. Hence Excel…
The main point of baker's math is not to have recipes that you can share on the internet which people can then blindly follow but to have a repeatable process that works for the flour you use and whatever level of technique/skill you have.
Say you bake bread with a certain type of flour at a 75% hydration and you had a hard time shaping the dough; next time using the same flour drop the percentage to 70% and you might have an easier time and if you are happy with the bread you stick with that hydration. Or work on your technique. Or both. If you switch flour brand or type, you'll have to figure out the optimum hydration level again. But being systematic about weighing out your ingredients means you can at least repeat it once you get to the optimal ratios.
$625 is not "pricey", it's ridiculuously expensive.
$625 is a goddamned bargain.
Eg: recipe for "plain bread" can be:
- 60 - 70 kg wheat flour
- 40 - 30 kg rye flour
- 1.5 - 2 kg yeasts
- 1.8 - 1.5 kg of salt
- 0.x potato starch for keeping loafs unsticked, etc
No water in recipe: a) it's assumed 50% of flour weight (1 liter of water equals to 1kg); b) around 40 years ago cost of 50 l of water was less then 0.01 zł so it didn't show in price calculations.
Very often (in loafs with rye flour) there can be no rye flour addition at all - all rye flour is added as sourdough (water and rye flour, 50-50), amounts need to be adjusted.
Now, for ingradients for recipe in column one we have: 100 + 1.5 + 1.8 + 0.x + 50 (water) what gives 153.x kg of raw dough. But after baking and storing it some water evaporates so total weight of finished product is less then 153.x kg, maybe 135 kg, maybe 128 kg - depends on loaf weight - bigger loaf then less water evaporates. That number is called "efficiency" of the recipe, you can read it in industry standards books for given loaf weight or measure yourself by test baking. It is used to calculate product price/order or ingradients for given order.
That method is industry standard, we try to teach it to a journeymans. If only they didn't have problems with basic %'s... H_2O ? What's that ? NaCl ? Forget it. Seriously, what teachers in basic schools are doing ??
Confectioners do not use that method, they sum everything and substract wastes.
Teaching it in such uninteresting ways kids don't remember it. And I'm not surprised based on funding and wages...
Yes. Almost all recipes get the presentation wrong by using a mix of units and fractions, e.g.:
1 cup flour, sifted
2/3 cup water
1 tsp salt
0.5 g yeast
1 large egg Flour: 100%
Water: 66%
Salt: 2%
Instant yeast: 0.6%
Total: 170%My brain will not stop telling me that the total is 168.6%.
I just chuck some flour on the scale, whack the % symbol, and use the set percentages for everything else.
You do. The single most important factor is "what does the dough feel like - how stiff and hard, or how loose and wet?"
The water % captures this in 1 number.
e.g. A 60% hydration pizza dough is much stiffer than a 80% hydration focaccia dough.
Just by seeing that one number, I get an idea of how the dough is going to be to work with.
Flour 100 parts, water 66 parts and so on
(+) because that is what it is
> Flour 100 parts, water 66 parts and so on
> (+) because that is what it is
It is! But it's a ratio to a standard 100 … and that's literally what a percentage is ("per centum" = "by the hundred").
If you used the formula with a base of 1000 grams of flour, that's:
water: 660g
salt: 20g
yeast: 6g
Usually, bakers allow for a reasonably large margin of error, and they'll also intentionally diverge from a formula based on circumstance or whim. Getting to 1700 from 1686 would take an intentional diversion.
If you're measuring 8g of salt, then yeah, maybe you want 8.0g - to the first decimal point.
If you're going beyond that, then where did you get your scale, how much did it cost, what are the benefits and how do you find using it? Do you tweezer salt grains, for instance?
1 cup of flour? I can easily get double the amount in my cup depending on how I scoop it.
1 cup chopped mint leaves… wtf?
1 large potato… kill me! At the farmers market potato’s can come in very different shapes and sizes.
I’m confident enough of a cook to know how much mint and potato I want, but it’s impossible for flour.
My rule of thumb is if the packet describes it in grams, then why should the recipe use volume??
Converting between volume and weight is also senseless for anything other than water.
You're right though that you can definitely pack a measuring cup with flour and get more than you intended. Bread can be pretty persnickety too, which is why volume based recipes mention how to fill the measuring cup.
Here is the secret: recipes are not all that precise. There is no point getting a caliper out to measure the length of a cinnamon stick when the variation between individual people's tastes is already larger than the variation in the (admittedly humorous) "cup of chopped mint leaves." A recipe will come out fine for large variations in input ingredients, if that wasn't true do you think the standard measuring cup sizes would be 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 and 1?
Yeah—and what happens if you end up with a large potato the size of a small potato? Then you're completely hosed.
Once I have designed the recipe in bakers' percentage I use my handy spreadsheet to convert this to grams for the final recipe.
When you spend some time making bread you get the hang of how things work together. How much is 80, 90 or 100% of water, what kind of correction in % of water I need depending on flour composition, whether you want 2 or maybe 3% salt for this particular bread, how much sourdough starter you want, etc.
I also use large amounts of starter and of very varying composition (wet starters, stiff starters, etc.), so even if I want to repeat the same recipe I may need to adapt it to a different starter.
So this is making the design a very easy process when it would be kinda hard when looking at grams.
But I'm sure there's a reason they do it this way instead, Surely we aren't the first ones to think of this obvious alternative. I believe historically flour was big economic concern for bakers, so maybe putting it in terms of the thing that makes the biggest dent in their budget was more convenient.
It usually doesn’t complicate it too much because most starters are 100% hydration - ie equal mass of flour and water.
(The one weird hack you wish you didn't know about your favorite restaurants' most flavorful dishes!)
Sounds like you want the total percentage which is just as easy to find. Given their example, the total is 170%. The proportion of flour to the total is 100%/170% = ~59%.
Think of it as a "separation of concerns". Using a base unit allows you to measure without regard for the other ingredients. Expressing it in percent allows you to scale a recipe without regard for the literal amounts. It's a good system.
Ever write CSS with "rem" units? It's the same idea.
The abuse would be if you think that percentages should always refer to portions of the whole. Not sure that’s correct, though.
And then the point is just that we typically condition people to treat percentages as probabilities rather than odds. So you would have said something like 50:33:1:0.3 in “odds speak” for flour:water:salt:yeast in the dough mixture discussed in OP. But bakers instead communicate “:66:2:0.6” with the first number always implicitly being 100 (great), and they then use the % symbol (slightly confusing).
Because they never say “flour: 100%” an unsuspecting novice might think that a 60% hydration dough is ~40% flour by mass, mix this together to form a 150%-hydration mixture, and wonder why the only thing that they can make with it is some sort of pancakes.
The total ingredients being 170% can be found confusing initially. I'm glad the author provided more context and the example of a 500g flour recipe.