IMPROVE YOUR SOURDOUGH BREAD MAKING SKILLS
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- How you can use preferments to give more flavor and better structure to your bread — it’s not hard at all.
- Step by step instructions for creating your own sourdough starter and then using it to bake great bread.
- Troubleshooting a dough that is not rising or doesn’t produce the bread you had in mind.
- Ideas for what to do with leftover sourdough starter you can’t use for bread making.
- Plus interviews with opinionated French baker Sebastien Boudet, homebaker Ying Shi, and anticonformist world champion bread baker Mike Zakowski.
Most of the time, when I bake bread, I don’t look at a recipe.
Sure, I read a lot of books about bread and gather ideas from them, but more often than not, when it’s time to make the bread, it’s just me, my scale and a few numbers in my head.
I think about the previous breads I made, what worked last time with the specific mix of flours I am about to use. On a small slip of paper, or — more and more often these days — in a file in BreadStorm, I write down the proportions of ingredients as I decide what to do with them in the bread I am making today. And then, I start weighing ingredients.
This is possible because all breads are related.
Start with any bread recipe and strip away all ingredients that aren’t strictly necessary and soon you’ll notice that you are left with just four basic ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast (or leaven). Similarly, working from the other direction, you can start with those ingredients, varying their proportions and maybe adding one or two extra ingredients (fats, seeds, nuts, maybe some sweeteners…) and get to almost any type of bread.
But how does all this work?
Luckily, it’s not hard at all.
It all comes down to just a few basic variables and then a lot of testing to find out the values that give YOU the best results when using your ingredients. Understand those variables and you can be the chief scientist in your kitchen — and start experimenting.
The Formula
As I already mentioned, to make great bread, all you need is four ingredients (three actually, but we’ll get to that later): flour, water, leaven, and salt. Change the amount of salt too much and your bread is no longer edible, so most of the time we just play with the proportions between water and flour. Let’s start with an example: the most basic bread recipe of them all. To make the math as easy as possible, I am using 1000 grams of flour.- 1000g bread flour
- 700g water
- 10g fresh yeast
- 20g salt
- 100% bread flour
- 70% water
- 1% fresh yeast
- 2% salt
- 70% of 1000g is 700g (in math speak: 1000 * 0.7 = 700)
- 2% of 1000g is 20g (1000 * 0.02 = 20)
- 1% of 1000g is 10g (1000 * 0.01 = 10)
IMPROVE YOUR SOURDOUGH BREAD MAKING SKILLS
Download the free guide today
FREE
- How you can use preferments to give more flavor and better structure to your bread — it’s not hard at all.
- Step by step instructions for creating your own sourdough starter and then using it to bake great bread.
- Troubleshooting a dough that is not rising or doesn’t produce the bread you had in mind.
- Ideas for what to do with leftover sourdough starter you can’t use for bread making.
- Plus interviews with opinionated French baker Sebastien Boudet, homebaker Ying Shi, and anticonformist world champion bread baker Mike Zakowski.
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Comments (43)
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This was precisely the information I went in search of this morning. While I’ve yet to apply it, I would like to thank you in advance. You’ve made approaching the process much more… well… approachable.
Do you know why the ingredients are the basis of the ratios instead of the finished dough?
I’m no expert, but I would assume that it’s impossible to predict exactly how much water evaporates during the baking process.
Hi, I have a basic question. Is that 1% for dried or active yeast?
Cheers ^_^
Thank you. Your explanation of the Baker’s Formula was excellent. Finally, I understand it.
Does anyone have a hydration percentage for 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread?
Hi none of your basic bread formulas state any sugar ? Yet all our books state using sugar in all sizes of loaf but they come out very heavy ?
SUGAR in bread?? The author is European, and sugar does not belong in bread in most European food cultures (unless you’re using dry yeast perhaps, a teaspoon of sugar in the poolish to help feed/activate the yeast?).For fresh yeast or sourdough, no sugar is necessary.
Please, how many malt syrup, sugar, salt yeast will I put in 50kg of flour bread.
grams are weight. you measure liquid in ml.
Hi Andrea!
In bread-making, it’s common (and useful) to weigh also liquids as that is always more accurate than measuring by volume.
With water, it’s straightforward: 1 ml of water weights exactly 1 gram. With other liquids, conversions are more complex — but once you know the weight, weighing is still a good choice.
Happy baking!
Thank You! I was looking for a quick and concise guide with starting ratio to play with. I don’t usually comment on stuff, but I really found this helpful.
Thank you SO much for this. It is very helpful….but I wonder too…I use different flours (Spelt, Quinoa, Amaranth, Einkhorn) as well as seeds in my multi seed multi grain bread. How do I figure those in….are they part of that total 100% and how do I add Honey and butter? I love your Bread magazine too! Thank you!
I need recipe for 50kg bakers flour to inprove the guality of my product
My sourdough has Rye, all purpose and whole wheat flours PLUS Corn meal, oats, wheat germ. How do I calculate hydration will all this? Total weight (dry is 22.75 oz and wet is 16.25 oz? or add more water for the non-flour things? My dough is very sticky and bread is dry & crumbly but tastes fabulous.
Please help.
This is very helpful!
How do you handle hydration percentages if there is liquid from eggs, fruit, or beer in the recipe? (Other than “know that it will be wetter…”)
Great Post.
The brown breads or the whole wheat breads which we get in store, contains whole wheat flour and some proportion of either Soy or All purpose flour. So to make 100% how much % should be Whole wheat and how much % should be Soy/All purpose? Also what’s the hydration level when we bake a whole wheat bread.
Also if we choose to use only whole wheat flour and none other, will there be any change in hydration level? Also does professional bakers consider using only Whole Wheat flour.
Many Thanks
hi, thanks. how would adding some other items like nuts and seeds to this bread affect the calculation?
Hi Jack! That’s a good question.
Usually, the extra ingredients such as nuts are added in addition to the other ingredients and don’t affect these calculations. For example, you could add 10% walnuts to the formula in this article — for 1000 g flour, that would be 100 grams of walnuts.
I hope this helps!
Am finding out that not everyone takes into account, the flour and water in the levain in their final dough %ages. Seeing as how the hydration level in levains could be anything from 50% to a 150%,
I´m having a hard time calculating this in my formulas. Is there any easier way?
Thanks for this great blog btw!!
Thanks for your comment, Raj,
Yes, you’re right: as the amount of leaven in the final dough increases, its hydration becomes more and more important for the final hydration.
If you always use a starter at the same hydration and roughly the same amount of it, I find it easy to just think of the formula without taking the starter into account. For more detailed formula development, you can use software like BreadStorm (if you are on a Mac) or a spreadsheet 🙂
One thing I’ve been thinking about… I wonder if adding a web based tool like this to our web site would be something bakers would like to see?
First Thank you for all your kindness and time to make clear You are a Wounderful Mentor.
About the question for adding to the Web site something like I will appreciate because not everyone have a money to enroll in the Bread Storn is like $ 147.00 I believe.
I hope you Understand my few words because English is my SL .I ‘m apologize for any miss understanding. Sincerely Pilar Anderson
Thank you, Pilar! I know, BreadStorm is a great tool but it’s got some limitations: price is one, as is the fact that it’s only available on a Mac…
Keep an eye on our blog / newsletter… If we decide to move forward with a project like this, we’ll definitely let you know 🙂
Happy baking!
So, in your hydration example above, does the remaining 80% come from bread flour?
Ah, I’m sorry for the vague example!
But you’re exactly right. So, the actual formula would be:
20% wholemeal flour
80% bread flour
80% water
2% salt
1% fresh yeast
(or maybe 20% or so of sourdough instead of yeast)
Thank you for the clarification!
So to clarify, if I have 150g of ripe Sourdough starter with 100% hydration do I add that amount of flour and water less when I am totaling my flour and water for the mix? To rephrase is my total flour and water for the mix incorporating what I would add for my SD starter? Thanks!
This was very helpful. Your simplified explanations clarified everything for me. Thank you!
Awesome! I’m happy it worked 🙂 Thank you for the comment!