Baker's Math (2009)(thefreshloaf.com) |
Baker's Math (2009)(thefreshloaf.com) |
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%.
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.
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?
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.
I've chosen to use Odoo rather than roll my own. It's highly customizable and open source. I'm self hosting it and I've written a couple of small plugins so far. I'm finding it pretty hackable. It's built from comfortably boring tech (Python + PostgreSQL backend, Bootstrap + JS frontend). Not perfect by any means (for example there's an annoying split between the paid and free versions, although there are plugins to extend the free version to do nearly everything the paid one can, at least for my needs), but from what I can see it's way ahead of most other similar offerings and there's a big community of developers behind it and tutorials for nearly everything.
It's a decent ERP for a restaurant. I will need to build some bakery specific stuff on top but it's already reducing our workload a lot. Previously my partner was doing the low tech excel sheets and paper receipts method and we're gonna do a slow transition to Odoo over the next 6 months or so.
Besides that, we are trialling Rocket.Chat for Slack style messaging and Outline wiki (Notion clone minus database views) for knowledge management, both free and self hosted.
Odoo is somewhat technical to learn, unavoidably (as with any ERP software). But it's been a good test of the other two to see whether non-technical baking staff can use them. Some of them are very non-technical, internet = Facebook level.
Besides a few teething problems, so far so good. It's a learning experience for me, for sure. I'm staying out of the kitchen mostly but I am studying the coffee side of the business which is lovely change of pace from coding.
Would you mind sharing the name of that 90s software?
What makes it impossible to recreate with low/no-code tools? It sounds like a relatively standard interface over some calculations which sounds like it should fit.
This doesn't really qualify as pricey.
Niche books can justifiably command higher prices.
Do all fractions have to add to 1?
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.
I’d need to double check, but I could have sworn that Tartine did have an autolyse where they have you wait a half hour before adding the salt and last bit of water. I don’t have the book handy at the moment though…
For example, I make for myself at home a bread that is highly enriched in proteins, by washing the dough before baking, to remove a large part of the starch, up to 75% of it, so that the dough is enriched in gluten (the wheat flour used has a gluten to starch ratio around 1:6, while the bread made thus has a gluten to starch ratio around 2:3).
If a rest time of at least 20 minutes is not inserted between kneading the dough and washing it, the dough is not cohesive enough and the washing detaches not only the starch grains but also gluten fragments, causing a loss of the proteins that are intended to remain in the bread.
It is possible that with a much longer time of kneading the rest time could be omitted, but when the kneading is done manually and you make just one bread for yourself, it is certainly preferable to knead for only a short time, followed by a rest time during which you are free to do other activities.
one such source: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-a-bakers-dozen-13
Also doesn’t pass some cursory thinking. If the law is about loaves being too light or small, how does giving out an extra loaf to people who buy 12 help? Who is even buying 12 loaves of bread when restaurants are rare and refrigeration non-existent? Armies, but then they’re buying even way more.
I don’t know why this needs a backstory. A dozen is a common number for objects because it’s highly composite. Then buy X get 1 free promotions are one of the simplest ways to give discounts. No one has to be the first to do it. It could spread and people could come up with it on their own.
If the baker gives you 13 and calls it 12, that makes it harder for a greedy baker narrative to stick. It doesn't have to be logical, it's about managing impressions.
> Who is even buying 12 loaves of bread when restaurants are rare and refrigeration non-existent?
The average family used to be the size of a small army. 12 loafs of bread could be eaten in 1 or 2 days if you've got 12 hungry kids and bread is a major component of their diet.
I suspect part of it was make 13 so if one gets messed up you still have 12 - and usually you don’t lose one so an extra is available.
Kind of like how Denny’s started giving you the thing they mixed the milkshake in along with the shake.
But don’t forget, people used to eat _way_ more bread in earlier times …
I find it also depends on your flour, even batch to batch (we buy 50 lb bags). Some have higher moisture content and one needs to adjust by a few % even in the same external conditions.
I'm really not.
I don't do it "by feel", I measure everything in grams, including water. I hate recipes in "cups" since a cup of flour or salt is not a fixed quantity - it depends on grain size, how hard you pack it down, the weather etc. But 10g salt is a fixed amount.
I'm just saying that "500g flour, 60% hydration" tells me a lot about both how to measure it accurately (300g water), and how it will feel (fairly stiff). It's an accurate part of the recipe, expressed in the fewest numbers.
The % is scale-invariant.
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 care, both to stop it from getting everywhere and to get it kneaded enough that it actually rises (if that is even desired)
it's a single, scale-invariant number that conveys important information. And can be used to weigh accurately.
I am often amused in forums like this one, where in one moment we will decry those who who do not learn their tech by fiddling with it, for fear of breaking it - and then in the next breath be afraid of putting a touch too much water in our flour.
I regret trying to say buying a dozen would be uncommon. It’s more that even if they sell a dozen, of course there’d frequently be orders smaller than that.
I once found a book of old German jokes and basically every third one the joke's essence was some kind of slander against the town miller.
I do notice seasonal changes, but that's IMHO more due to changes in ambient room temperature than anything else.
Also, I would say that measuring in grams allows you to notice and more accurately quantify that "it's dryer than usual today for the same quantities - must be due to the ambient conditions that require an adjustment".