RCannetoAL@aol.com asked:
>Just bought the book The Bread Bible and I am having a hard time
>understanding how to figure out baker's percentages. Please help!
I wonder how many replies you'll get? Still, it's a common question, even
in professional baking circles.
Measuring by volume (cups, tbsp, etc) is hard to do consistently, so almost
all professional bakers measure by weight. Most don't understand why
everyone doesn't.
The next step is baker's percentages. Everything is expressed as a
percentage of the weight of the flour. Flour is ALWAYS expressed as
100%. One advantage here, is this approach is very easy to scale.
So, with a ciabatta, your recipe might be something like (please note, this
is NOT a recipe, this is numbers off the top of my head):
ingredient percentage weight 1 weight 2
flour 100% 1000 gr 2500 gr
water 80% 800 gr 2000 gr
salt 3% 3 gr 7.5 gr
yeast 2% 2 gr 5 gr
It's easy to put the recipe into a spreadsheet and tell the spreadsheet you
want 2,000 grams of dough.
While baker's percentages will work with pounds and ounces, metric is a lot
easier to scale. Quick - what's 5 times 4.5 ounces?
Hope this helps,
Mike
--
Mike Avery
MAvery@mail.otherwhen.com