How would bakers' percentages help you figure out how much of each ingredients to use? First, you'd start by adding up all of your percentages. What if you want to go the other way? Say you know that you want a pound of finished dough. Weird, right? That's just the nature of the beast. Some more astute readers might note that if you look at the bakers' percentages, it all adds up to 179%. Multiply 67 by 0.12, and I get 8 ounces (rounded from 8.04 ounces).ĭo the same math across the board (rounding to the nearest 0.05 ounce), and you get the following weights: So, for example, the water recipe is 67% water. Now all I have to do to figure out the rest of my ingredients is to multiply them by their various percentages. To calculate the rest of my ingredients, I first divide the amount of flour I have by 100, giving me 0.12 ounces. So let's say I start with 12 ounces of flour on my scale. My standard, everyday white bread recipe breaks down to the following percentages: Scaling Recipes Using Baker's Percentages If this all sounds confusing, hang on a minute. Add up the weight of the flour, divide by 100, and that's the unit you use to measure the rest of your ingredients.* It doesn't matter how much a particular ingredient weighs, only how much it weighs in relation to everything else. And it doesn't matter what kind or how many varieties of flour. It doesn't matter if you've got 15 ounces of flour or five pounds. The beauty of expressing recipes in terms of percentages is that the units of measure can be anything: grams, ounces, picograms, whatever. In baker's talk, that's called 50 percent hydration. If, for example, you had a dough with 16 ounces of flour and 8 ounces of water and 0.32 ounces of salt, you'd say that the dough contains 50 percent water because the water weighs 50 percent of what the flour weighs. Every other ingredient is then expressed in terms of its ratio to the amount of flour. Think of bakers' percentages this way: the flour is equal to 100 percent. In baking, as with much of cooking, the actual amounts of an ingredient don't matter much - it's the ratio of ingredients that matters. Outside the bread-making world, percentages indicate what part of the whole a particular component makes up, while a bakers' percentage is about how various other ingredients relate to the weight of the flour in a recipe. If you abandon that pie chart and look at it through the bread baker's eyes, it makes a little more sense. Okay, maybe it's not that secret, but it's something that tends to boggle the ordinary person who was awake enough in math class to realize that if the pie chart is full, that's 100 percent, and if you've got more, then you need another pie pan. I thought there must have been some strange mistake in the writing and proofreading, and I moved on, blithely unaware that I had just seen the seekrit spy code for breadmakers. C'mon now, how can anything possibly add up to more than 100 percent? It just doesn't make sense. The first time I saw baker's percentages in a book, I thought the writer had gone mad.
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