Baker's percentages, finally explained to myself
Why every recipe here is written in percentages, and the one calculation that makes any loaf scale to any tin.
Tagged “baking”
17 posts. All tags
Dark rye, and the one bake I cannot rush
A 70% rye loaf with coffee and treacle that needs a full day in the tin before you cut it, which is the hardest instruction in baking.
A frying-pan flatbread for a hot week
When the kitchen is at 29 °C and the oven is unthinkable, a yoghurt flatbread with starter discard, cooked in a frying pan in four minutes a piece.
Overnight focaccia, or how to use the waiting
The dough that takes twelve hours of nothing and twenty minutes of work. It happens to be exactly the shape of an observing session.
The first proper loaf from the new starter
Ten weeks after starting a culture from rye flour and tap water, it finally made a loaf I would give to someone else. Notes on what changed.
Hot cross buns, counted in percentages
Twelve Good Friday buns from a yeasted enriched dough, written as baker's percentages so I can halve them next year without a calculator meltdown.
A light rye for spring, and someone else's proving basket
A 40% rye tin loaf for a starter that is barely three weeks old, plus a time-lapse of a rye dough doing what mine does too slowly to watch.
Starting over with a new starter
My old sourdough culture died over the winter. Beginning again with rye flour, tap water and a jar on the radiator shelf.
Morris
The starter I had kept going for years finally gave up in the cold kitchen. A short note on what happened, what I should have done, and some bread without any starter at all.
Baking in a 15-degree kitchen
My kitchen is at 15 °C this month and every dough takes twice as long. Three small adjustments that have kept bread on the table anyway.
Stollen, with Morris doing some of the work
A Christmas stollen raised partly with the starter, written out in baker's percentages, with notes on why rich dough is slow and what I got wrong last year.
Barbari, and an oven I will never own
Twelve minutes inside an Iranian bakery, then my attempt at barbari in a domestic oven: same grooves, same glaze, a third of the length and a fraction of the heat.
Twenty minutes from rye field to loaf
A German museum film follows winter rye from horse-drawn sowing to a wood-fired oven, and makes my bag of supermarket flour look like the end of a very long story.
A Mischbrot, after watching someone else's kitchen
A German-style mixed rye and wheat loaf at 40% rye, worked out after watching a home-baking video filmed in a kitchen as small and untidy as mine.
A brick, with notes
The same recipe I have baked two hundred times came out dense, pale and flat. The kitchen was 16 °C and I followed the clock instead of the dough.
The everyday loaf, written down properly
The plain sourdough I bake most weeks, at 75% hydration with 10% wholemeal, finally recorded in percentages so I stop reconstructing it from memory.
Quadrantids from the back step, and the first loaf of the year
An hour before dawn on the fourth of January, nine meteors, two fingers I could not feel, and a loaf that had been proving while I was outside.