91–100 of 117 posts
Just the other day my wife misread our bread roll recipe and added too much water to the flour. I'm glad, I know bakers math and I'm good at mental arithmetic, so the dough could be rescued easily.
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Yeah, it was an investment for sure. But it has allowed us to save a ton of time every day (e.g. save 30 minute on the autolyse), make tweaks to our recipes to match our processes, change our starters (use stiff levain instead of poolish for certain breads), and a bunch of other details. Not needed for the lay-person. For sourdough I’d opt for the Tartine books.
Autolyse probably is not the best example. I have several bread-making books and I don't think a single one advocates for autolyse. Not Tartine, not Forkish's, not Reinhart's. Lots of youtubers and bloggers love it though, no idea why.
I’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.
I've always thought of baking as a science and cooking as an art (although both are on a spectrum from art to science).
Commercial 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…
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.
My Baking experience improved substantially for me when I moved to weighing my ingredients instead of measuring by volume. My voice assistant has also been super helpful in quick conversions from recipes.
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.
It usually doesn’t complicate it too much because most starters are 100% hydration - ie equal mass of flour and water.
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> the Modernist Bread set. It’s pricey... $625 is not "pricey", it's ridiculuously expensive.
I'm not so sure, I had the same reaction to your comment, but then clicked through; it's a set of five thick books, essentially a history book, two textbooks, and two recipe books, at $125ea. Pricey, definitely, but phrased like that I think not so ridiculous.
This doesn't really qualify as pricey.
My Baking experience improved substantially for me when I moved to weighing my ingredients instead of measuring by volume. My voice assistant has also been super helpful in quick conversions from recipes.
I’ve never understood cooking by volume and will reject any recipe that uses it. Especially for ingredients that don’t have a fixed density. 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Autolyse probably is not the best example. I have several bread-making books and I don't think a single one advocates for autolyse. Not Tartine, not Forkish's, not Reinhart's. Lots of youtubers and bloggers love it though, no idea why.
Maybe not, but they do look at that one because a bunch of books are totally in favor, and a bunch are either against it or ignore it, so coming up with a definitive answer was a reasonable thing to do. Other examples of time savers would be when to add fats and salts in a dough, and proofing and punching times. I’d need to double check, but I could have sworn that Tartine did have an autolyse where they have you wai…
We call it here in Poland "baker's percentage" - how much ingradients are needed for 100 kg of summed flours. 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…
Teaching it in such uninteresting ways kids don't remember it. And I'm not surprised based on funding and wages...