March 31, 2015 - 5:00pm
Keeping It Simple
These were commissions! 20% whole wheat, long cold bulk fermentation (24 hours) and long cold proof (18 hours). 300 g levain for 800 g flour, so about 38% levain by baker's percentage. Produced two medium-sized loaves. I can't stop experimenting with levain percentage!
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any of them at the drop of a leash!
If your levain is 100% hydration there would be 150 g of flour in it. Adding this to the 800 g of dough flour gives you 950 g total flour of which 150 g is prefermented or 150/950 = 15.79% I think this would be the way the bakers % would work
flour 100% with 15.79% prefermented.
But bakers math doesn't effect the looks or taste much :-)
Well done and Happy baking
I used 800 g of flour including levain at 100% hydration -- so, 650 g flour, 150 g flour from levain
300 g of levain with 800 g flour total is around 38% levain, if you take all of the levain as a percentage of the total flour
I have tried to search through TFL threads for calculating levain as total % of a loaf, but I have to confess that i'm still confused!
Thanks for your kind words...Lucy's approval is always a huge boost!
flour is in the levain divided by the 800 total flour makes for 18.75% prefermented flour. Bakers percentage.depends on who is doing it:-) I say if you are including the water in the levain as part of the calculation then you have to include the dough water too:-) If the overall hydration was 75% the total water would be 800 *.75 = 600 so the levain of 300 g of flour and water divided by 1,400 total flour and water in the mix is 21.4% of the total flour and water. So it depends ....and it shouldn't....but it does. So now we have 3 different ways to figure it .
What we need is a better way to do the figuring:-) And luckily we don't and why bread math is still not a an exact science.
Happy baking
I feel like birds are circling around my head Loony Tunes-style, but that's okay. You're absolutely right about the water being included as well, and you're also right that bread science is not an exact science!
I guess I just need to keep experimenting with methods to figure out which seems the most pragmatically useful for describing my formulas.
Thanks so, so much for your insight...as always!