Some might remember my previous post explaining bakers' percentages, especially the bit about doing things differently if I ever rewrote it. I finally got around to doing just that :) There's a...
Some might remember my previous post explaining bakers' percentages, especially the bit about doing things differently if I ever rewrote it. I finally got around to doing just that :)
There's a copy here if anyone wants a play around with it. I've tried to test everything in it that I can, but it's recently finished, so please forgive any errors you notice :) I put a README sheet in the file that hopefully explains everything. I wrote it in libreoffice calc, most of the formulae (if not the formatting) seems to work in google sheets, but I haven't tested it in other software.
As a quick run down of how I use it, and how I used my previous one:
I put the weight of each thing, and how many of those things, I want to make. I have a weight off-set here, which lets me add a certain percentage to the dough weight to take into account stuff like dough that might be left stuck to the bowl, or if I'm trying to make bread rolls that are a specific weight I can try my best to guesstimate water loss during fermentation/baking. I also select what my main flour, hydration, and yeast sources are.
I put the bakers' percentage of each ingredient I want to use in the "main recipe" section next, and now in this version of my spreadsheet most of the ingredients have a drop-down menu to select different ingredients if one of them isn't in my usual "loadout".
Then I can adjust the protein content of my flour if I want, and make sure that the mix of vital wheat gluten and other flours doesn't exceed 100%. At this point I can also add whether I want to use a bassinage/double hydration, as well as setting up a preferment or scalded flour recipe if I want to use those. If I have any of these set up, it removes the weight of the flour/water/yeast used from the weights in the main recipe, so I don't accidentally double up on anything. This way I don't have to do any maths myself to make sure my ratios are correct.
At the bottom of this I have all my totals, including the overall hydration which takes into account the water weight from things like butter, or the fact that if I'm using milk, some of it isn't water.
Then below this I have a table that has a row for each of my loaded ingredients, where it breaks down the nutritional values for each ingredient, with totals for the whole dough, per item, and per 100g for each nutritional value. Whilst it's not going to be as precise as how actual nutritional values are calculated, it gives me a good ballpark estimate of where the recipe is sitting.
Using bakers' percentages has really helped me to understand how recipes work, and what affect ingredients have at different levels. 90% of the time now I just make up my own recipes by inputting the values I think I want and using the weights it gives me.
It might seem like a lot, but this has probably been 4-5 years in the making at this point. My previous bread calculator started off as something like this, which is actually how I store recipes I like now. I slowly added to little by little until it ended up looking like this. There were some errors in the calculations though, and something broke between LibreOffice updates. It was super unruly to maintain, and the layout was weird with everything being tacked on after the fact. Adding a new ingredient was also such a hassle that I just didn't. I'm hoping that this new update will solve a lot of that :)
Thought some people here would find this interesting, so I hope it has been! If you have something similar, I'd love to see a pic or a shared version. I've seen a few different examples over the years, and looking at how people set up their calcs to fit their own needs is always really neat.
I have never made bread or any dough, so I don't understand everything about the details, but it is pretty neat still. I like the idea that it lets you develop and also check your intuition. I am...
I have never made bread or any dough, so I don't understand everything about the details, but it is pretty neat still. I like the idea that it lets you develop and also check your intuition.
I am curious about something: Do you feed corrections back into the spreadsheet, like "this was supposed to make 100g tools but they came out only 95g, so I tweaked this factor and the next batch came out right." And if so, are those corrections stable over time? My (more or less uninformed) sense is that there is some "art" to bread making, and I wonder if you feel like your model is good enough to get repeatable results or do you think there are unmodeled qualities of the ingredients that introduce a random factor.
I have a google sheet with a set of macros that merge a grocery list and the recipe items from a meal plan into a list organized by section and sorted in the order I walk through the grocery store. I have been using it for a few years now, and it is super helpful. So I imagine yours is similarly an "old friend" to you.
I definitely got very used to using my old one, idiosyncrasies and all. It's neat to be able to make tools like this, at least until I'm good enough to figure out programming something more...
I definitely got very used to using my old one, idiosyncrasies and all. It's neat to be able to make tools like this, at least until I'm good enough to figure out programming something more custom.
There's no way currently to feed any information back in with corrections, it's mainly just experimentation and whether I remember/remember to note my results. Like I know from trying that a 113% overall dough weight offset will put me within a gram or two of a 100g final bread roll weight.
I do have distant plans (dreams) of making things smarter, easier to predict things, but there is definitely an "art" to it. In so much that there are just too many variables to track to ever be totally reproduceable in a home environment. Temperature, humidity, changes in how much moisture your flour has absorbed from the atmosphere, differences in flours between batches (even with the same brand). There's always going to some degree of uncertainty when you're working with a natural product, but that's part of what experience helps you identify as you're looking at/handling your dough throughout the process.
Whilst I like understanding how to reproduce certain things as closely as possible, this is more something that helps me be spontaneous if anything. Most of the time when I bake bread, it involves me walking into the kitchen with my laptop, pondering what I want to make, plugging in some numbers that I think will give me that, and then having all the weights I need to keep going.
I do store some of my more repeated recipes, as mentioned in my main post, but most of the time I'm just freestyling and trying to use my understanding of the "rules" to make sure something nice comes out of it :)
Thanks for the clarification. I suppose the commercial bakeries must have it down to a science (or the have bread artists tuning their production), but I'm kind of glad the technology can help you...
Thanks for the clarification. I suppose the commercial bakeries must have it down to a science (or the have bread artists tuning their production), but I'm kind of glad the technology can help you enjoy it, but there is still some art in it as well.
I’m not a baker but I did work in a bread factory for a while, and learned how many different things can affect the outcome in a substantial way. It’s cool to see you capturing some of that...
I’m not a baker but I did work in a bread factory for a while, and learned how many different things can affect the outcome in a substantial way. It’s cool to see you capturing some of that immense complexity here!
I guess I can only point at some of the things I’ve seen that led to challenges — like, in summer (in Australia) the factory literally used ice to cool the dough down, because otherwise just the ambient heat would make the dough rise too fast and deflate and become unworkable before we even got it onto trays.
Have you tinkered with water temperature/ambient temperature/humidity, and/or has your spreadsheet captured any of that?
And I guess the next challenging one is for seeded bread — have you got any kind of method or instinct about how much you need to compensate for heavily seedy/multigrain breads?
I have a section at the top for calculating water temp to get the dough temp you want, although I'm not 100% confident on how accurate it is. It was from a javascript calculator I found on github...
I have a section at the top for calculating water temp to get the dough temp you want, although I'm not 100% confident on how accurate it is. It was from a javascript calculator I found on github and thought I'd give it a go. At some point I want to make a proofing box that controls temp/humidity, brod and taylor make a nice collapsible one but it's so expensive. Otherwise, I definitely play around with temp depending on what ambient is, I have a beer brewing heater mat that I'll sometimes use in winter if things are a little chilly, or I'll cold proof in the fridge sometimes too.
In terms of seed/multigrain/alternative flours, there are a few things people can try out. For seeds, it's generally a good idea to presoak them in water so that they don't absorb excess from the dough.
In terms of whole wheat flours I'll usually add an extra 3% or so for every 10% of bread flour that I change out for whole wheat, and presoaking the whole wheat can help soften the bran a bit which stops it from damaging the gluten as much. It's vaguely similar for other grains, but each type of flour will have its own optimal absorption rate, and it'll depend on humidity, how much the flour has absorbed from the atmosphere, et c. And each flour will also have its own quirky rules, depending on if it has gluten forming proteins, what level of those it has, and what ratio those proteins are present in. Then for something like vital wheat gluten I might increase hydration by 1.5% for every 1% I add.
Some might remember my previous post explaining bakers' percentages, especially the bit about doing things differently if I ever rewrote it. I finally got around to doing just that :)
There's a copy here if anyone wants a play around with it. I've tried to test everything in it that I can, but it's recently finished, so please forgive any errors you notice :) I put a README sheet in the file that hopefully explains everything. I wrote it in libreoffice calc, most of the formulae (if not the formatting) seems to work in google sheets, but I haven't tested it in other software.
As a quick run down of how I use it, and how I used my previous one:
I put the weight of each thing, and how many of those things, I want to make. I have a weight off-set here, which lets me add a certain percentage to the dough weight to take into account stuff like dough that might be left stuck to the bowl, or if I'm trying to make bread rolls that are a specific weight I can try my best to guesstimate water loss during fermentation/baking. I also select what my main flour, hydration, and yeast sources are.
I put the bakers' percentage of each ingredient I want to use in the "main recipe" section next, and now in this version of my spreadsheet most of the ingredients have a drop-down menu to select different ingredients if one of them isn't in my usual "loadout".
Then I can adjust the protein content of my flour if I want, and make sure that the mix of vital wheat gluten and other flours doesn't exceed 100%. At this point I can also add whether I want to use a bassinage/double hydration, as well as setting up a preferment or scalded flour recipe if I want to use those. If I have any of these set up, it removes the weight of the flour/water/yeast used from the weights in the main recipe, so I don't accidentally double up on anything. This way I don't have to do any maths myself to make sure my ratios are correct.
At the bottom of this I have all my totals, including the overall hydration which takes into account the water weight from things like butter, or the fact that if I'm using milk, some of it isn't water.
Then below this I have a table that has a row for each of my loaded ingredients, where it breaks down the nutritional values for each ingredient, with totals for the whole dough, per item, and per 100g for each nutritional value. Whilst it's not going to be as precise as how actual nutritional values are calculated, it gives me a good ballpark estimate of where the recipe is sitting.
Using bakers' percentages has really helped me to understand how recipes work, and what affect ingredients have at different levels. 90% of the time now I just make up my own recipes by inputting the values I think I want and using the weights it gives me.
It might seem like a lot, but this has probably been 4-5 years in the making at this point. My previous bread calculator started off as something like this, which is actually how I store recipes I like now. I slowly added to little by little until it ended up looking like this. There were some errors in the calculations though, and something broke between LibreOffice updates. It was super unruly to maintain, and the layout was weird with everything being tacked on after the fact. Adding a new ingredient was also such a hassle that I just didn't. I'm hoping that this new update will solve a lot of that :)
Thought some people here would find this interesting, so I hope it has been! If you have something similar, I'd love to see a pic or a shared version. I've seen a few different examples over the years, and looking at how people set up their calcs to fit their own needs is always really neat.
I have never made bread or any dough, so I don't understand everything about the details, but it is pretty neat still. I like the idea that it lets you develop and also check your intuition.
I am curious about something: Do you feed corrections back into the spreadsheet, like "this was supposed to make 100g tools but they came out only 95g, so I tweaked this factor and the next batch came out right." And if so, are those corrections stable over time? My (more or less uninformed) sense is that there is some "art" to bread making, and I wonder if you feel like your model is good enough to get repeatable results or do you think there are unmodeled qualities of the ingredients that introduce a random factor.
I have a google sheet with a set of macros that merge a grocery list and the recipe items from a meal plan into a list organized by section and sorted in the order I walk through the grocery store. I have been using it for a few years now, and it is super helpful. So I imagine yours is similarly an "old friend" to you.
I definitely got very used to using my old one, idiosyncrasies and all. It's neat to be able to make tools like this, at least until I'm good enough to figure out programming something more custom.
There's no way currently to feed any information back in with corrections, it's mainly just experimentation and whether I remember/remember to note my results. Like I know from trying that a 113% overall dough weight offset will put me within a gram or two of a 100g final bread roll weight.
I do have distant plans (dreams) of making things smarter, easier to predict things, but there is definitely an "art" to it. In so much that there are just too many variables to track to ever be totally reproduceable in a home environment. Temperature, humidity, changes in how much moisture your flour has absorbed from the atmosphere, differences in flours between batches (even with the same brand). There's always going to some degree of uncertainty when you're working with a natural product, but that's part of what experience helps you identify as you're looking at/handling your dough throughout the process.
Whilst I like understanding how to reproduce certain things as closely as possible, this is more something that helps me be spontaneous if anything. Most of the time when I bake bread, it involves me walking into the kitchen with my laptop, pondering what I want to make, plugging in some numbers that I think will give me that, and then having all the weights I need to keep going.
I do store some of my more repeated recipes, as mentioned in my main post, but most of the time I'm just freestyling and trying to use my understanding of the "rules" to make sure something nice comes out of it :)
Thanks for the clarification. I suppose the commercial bakeries must have it down to a science (or the have bread artists tuning their production), but I'm kind of glad the technology can help you enjoy it, but there is still some art in it as well.
I’m not a baker but I did work in a bread factory for a while, and learned how many different things can affect the outcome in a substantial way. It’s cool to see you capturing some of that immense complexity here!
I guess I can only point at some of the things I’ve seen that led to challenges — like, in summer (in Australia) the factory literally used ice to cool the dough down, because otherwise just the ambient heat would make the dough rise too fast and deflate and become unworkable before we even got it onto trays.
Have you tinkered with water temperature/ambient temperature/humidity, and/or has your spreadsheet captured any of that?
And I guess the next challenging one is for seeded bread — have you got any kind of method or instinct about how much you need to compensate for heavily seedy/multigrain breads?
I have a section at the top for calculating water temp to get the dough temp you want, although I'm not 100% confident on how accurate it is. It was from a javascript calculator I found on github and thought I'd give it a go. At some point I want to make a proofing box that controls temp/humidity, brod and taylor make a nice collapsible one but it's so expensive. Otherwise, I definitely play around with temp depending on what ambient is, I have a beer brewing heater mat that I'll sometimes use in winter if things are a little chilly, or I'll cold proof in the fridge sometimes too.
In terms of seed/multigrain/alternative flours, there are a few things people can try out. For seeds, it's generally a good idea to presoak them in water so that they don't absorb excess from the dough.
In terms of whole wheat flours I'll usually add an extra 3% or so for every 10% of bread flour that I change out for whole wheat, and presoaking the whole wheat can help soften the bran a bit which stops it from damaging the gluten as much. It's vaguely similar for other grains, but each type of flour will have its own optimal absorption rate, and it'll depend on humidity, how much the flour has absorbed from the atmosphere, et c. And each flour will also have its own quirky rules, depending on if it has gluten forming proteins, what level of those it has, and what ratio those proteins are present in. Then for something like vital wheat gluten I might increase hydration by 1.5% for every 1% I add.