I tend to think of this as cocktail math. :)
Baker's Math (2009)
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#52Should it not be Bakers' Math?
That would be an insult to Mr. Baker.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but what you're saying is essentially "I don't need the recipe anymore - I can do this by feel", which is awesome, but who then is the recipe for except people who are trying to learn? Maybe throw us a bone :)
He/she is saying something slightly different, not “I like that I can do this by feel without percentages” but rather “I like how, by a quick glance at this percentage, I know something about how that will feel in the bowl.” 60% hydration: firmer, like Play-Doh without the crumbling 70% hydration: softer and maybe a little sticky 80% hydration: super sticky, still kneadable Really high hydration requires a lot more c…
Exactly that.
it's a single, scale-invariant number that conveys important information. And can be used to weigh accurately.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#54It’s called abuse of notation as it’s useful in practice but not strictly a percentage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_notation
What’s the abuse here? This seems like ‘math’ to me.
I don't know that I'd use the term abuse, but the basic idea is that there are things called odds ratios (Bayes' theorem looks especially convenient with them!) as distinct from things called probabilities... The distinction is precisely this one, that probabilities are implicitly normalized to 100% total while odds you're supposed to sum everything together and divide.
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.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#55I’m surprised how something so basic as learning that baking recipes are ratios of mass makes me feel more comfortable and inclined to try baking than anything ever has before. It’s such a simple concept, and much more approachable to me than I’d expected before I clicked the link.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#56Commercial baker here. One place where this kind of math gets really weird is when the recipe uses multiple kinds of flours. We make a loaf that uses three kinds of flour, so this means a recipe will have flour percentages that are less than 100%, but that sum to 100% so the hydration percentage works. For example, the recipe might say: Bread Flour 80%, Whole Wheat Flour 15%, and Rye Flour 5%. Personally I prefer jus…
Neat! Im curious - were you in tech before becoming a baker at all, or did you pick up the programming skills to help your baking career?
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.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#57Commercial baker here. One place where this kind of math gets really weird is when the recipe uses multiple kinds of flours. We make a loaf that uses three kinds of flour, so this means a recipe will have flour percentages that are less than 100%, but that sum to 100% so the hydration percentage works. For example, the recipe might say: Bread Flour 80%, Whole Wheat Flour 15%, and Rye Flour 5%. Personally I prefer jus…
It’s a small world. One of my friends worked on those books. We enjoyed a few years eating test bread every time we saw them.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#58For example, let's take a typical formula for French bread: 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%.
Yeah, the total is wrong. It's not a weird bakers' math total. It's a wrong total.
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.
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#59For example, let's take a typical formula for French bread: 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%.
The article mentions "rounded to nearest gram" but clearly they also round to nearest percent...
If you're working with 500g or 1000g of flour, then to the nearest gram is easily precise enough.
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?
Re: Baker's Math (2009)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the abuse here? This seems like ‘math’ to me.
I don't know that I'd use the term abuse, but the basic idea is that there are things called odds ratios (Bayes' theorem looks especially convenient with them!) as distinct from things called probabilities... The distinction is precisely this one, that probabilities are implicitly normalized to 100% total while odds you're supposed to sum everything together and divide. And then the point is just that we typically co…
Probabilities? Why do you need to bring those in?
Percentages are just a way of writing rational numbers. Bread recipes are expressed effectively as 1 part flour to n parts of each ingredient. But since n in that formulation is usually a value less than 1, expressing that number as a percentage is convenient. Percentage notation seems completely appropriate for this usecase.
So 60% hydration means 1 part flour to 60% of 1 part water, i.e. to .6 parts water.