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The second, figuring Overall Baker's Percent, is slightly more complicated. The first is relatively simple: the preferment is treated as any other ingredient.
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There are two different considerations relating to baker's percent when making bread with preferments. The next step is to multiply the percentages of each ingredient by 0.9: flour It is preferable to round this figure up, because it is better to have a little extra bread rather than not enough, so we round up to 0.9. Then divide our new desired dough weight by the sum of the percentages: We establish this by adding the percentages of the formula, which in this case total 168.25. The first step is to determine the Formula Conversion Factor. How can you recalculate the formula to obtain 150 pounds and retain the percentages of the ingredients? Let's assume that another colleague has given you a formula for French bread: flourĪlthough you like the bread very much, in your situation you only need to make 150 pounds of dough. By employing baker's percent, this is quick, accurate, and easily learned by the baker. There are times when we may need to recalculate the size of a formula in order to make either more or less bread. The entire formula would look like this: flour To obtain the weights of the remaining ingredients, first we divide the percentage by 100 to obtain a decimal, then multiply the resulting decimal by the weight of the flour. You decide to make this dough using 50 pounds of flour: flour Computing Pounds from Percentagesįor our second example, let's look at a formula for ciabatta: flour If we had used gallon pitchers to measure the water, we would have a rather cumbersome formula, much more difficult to assess. For one thing, we know at a glance that the bread has a 66% hydration (hydration is defined as the percentage of liquid in a dough, again based on the flour weight). It is worth noting that by simply looking at the percentages we can ascertain important things about this bread. When we follow the same method, we arrive at the following values for the salt and yeast: flour
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To determine the percentage of the other ingredients, we divide the weight of each one by the weight of the flour, and then multiply the result (which is in decimal form) by 100 to convert it to a percent.įor example, to calculate the percentage of water, we divide its weight by the flour's and multiply by 100: We can begin to express the formula as follows: flour We will begin with a straightforward recipe for white bread: flourĪs mentioned above, when using baker's percentage, the flour is represented as 100%, and all the other ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the flour's weight. In this discussion, we will talk about converting a simple bread formula into percentages transferring from percentages to pounds and how to compute the Formula Conversion Factor for use in scaling a recipe up or down. This common language enables the baker to not only communicate with other bakers, but also makes it possible to quickly assess a formula simply by seeing the percentages used.
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